Sharon Wauchob (Q9127)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Sharon Wauchob is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Sharon Wauchob |
Sharon Wauchob is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
There is no physical resemblance between Sharon Wauchob and Tinkerbell, but the designer’s hands seem to have the power of pixie dust, which allows anything they touch to fly. There’s no better way to describe Wauchob’s chiffons than that they look like shadows. Their almost unbelievable lightness is down to the quality of the French chiffons used and the designer’s experience working with them and with lingerie.Never have her chiffons been more romantic than they were for spring. The voluptuous and voluminous opening look was made of yards and yards of floaty fabric; other designs featured bias-cut ruffles that unfurled like fern fronds. A polka-dot printed number boasted heat-set Fortuny pleats. What allowed such decadent indulgence with chiffon, explained the designer on a call, was her complimentary use of jersey; the relative weightiness of this material, which works with gravity, provides a contrast to the flyaway quality of the chiffon. She used the knit for the asymmetrical draped Grecian column (Look 5), which was constructed with just one seam. (This editor couldn’t help but think there is some sort of spiritual link between Coco Chanel’s elevation of jersey and Wauchob’s.)Few garments are more redolent of ease than pajamas, and the designer returned to these for spring; also making a repeat appearance were the sleeve accessories (in sheer and solid options) that customers have so taken to over the past few seasons. They were paired with a camisole and what Wauchob referred to as her ’80s pants (pleated and wider) in Look 4; their addition gave a bubble silhouette to a polka-dot lace cami and tap pants set.In her collection notes, Wauchob said she’s been drawn to the pivot “between the opulent ’80s and the raw grit of the ’90s,” and open to embracing “contradictory moods, as we find ourselves again at the edge of change.” And yet there was no feeling of “dancing on the lip of the volcano” (a famousNew Yorkmagazine title for a story about Christian Lacroix and the market crash) in Wauchob’s collection because her focus was on the in-between. The broad shoulders of the draped top (Look 7) were supported not by padding but by twisting the fabric, a bit in the manner of a Mobius strip.Newest this season was the focus on outerwear; Wauchob said she “wanted to show another note to the song” and set herself the challenge of bringing lightness to this more structured category. Through technical prowess, she managed to create a trench-kimono hybrid.
The sleeves on the coat were slit, and you could fold the flaps in different ways or put your arms through them so that it looks almost like the coat is sitting on top of your body. A hooded cape created the shoulder span usually made with an inverted triangle cut, but the waist was actually curved in. This is not a time, Wauchob opined, for flatness and flat patterns, but for the movement and fluidity that three-dimensional draping allows. We must push forward, even if it is at a one-step-at-a-time cadence.
13 September 2024
To have something “up one’s sleeve,” means to be keeping something on reserve to pull out at just the right moment. Sharon Wauchob’s stealthy approach to design is loosely aligned with this idea, as her aim is to combine consistency with a sense of surprise. She never relies on tricks to achieve this, however. Everything from the selection of deadstock silks and the one-by-one hand-embroidery of a fall of fringe or a delicate feather is carefully considered. You’d never guess the amount of work that goes into Wauchob’s sensuously easy pieces, in part because, as the designer said on a call, “We don’t often really talk about what we’re doing; we just do.”One of the things Wauchob and team does best is lingerie and pajama dressing, though the designer is a deft hand at suiting and works with Savile Row tailors. Her mission this season was to try to take “something that’s quite personal and intimate” in a direction that’s more formal, almost to the point of opulence. One of the ways she did this was to use custom made resillé lace to create a shadow blouson with spiral-seams that can be worn alone or over a jacket (as in look 2). “I love the fact that it’s traditional lace, but it doesn’t look what people think about lace,” noted Wauchob. The same might be said of her take on the pajama suit (look 9); sheer track pants with strategic lining, silk hoodie, and lusciously draped sleeves-as-accessories that are an expansion of an idea she introduced for fall 2023. The versatility of these pieces should not be overlooked. Layering is important for Wauchob this fall, but the end goal isn’t warmth, but texture play and color contrasts. One of the ways that she creates dimensionality is through “scrunchies.” For fall these ingenious bands, introduced last season, wrap around the waist of a defined-shoulder, leather-look coat, that is actually made of a glazed silk/cotton/wool fabric in storm cloud gray. They are also attached to the hems of camisoles, some of which layered over bias-cut dresses.Feathers continue to enliven Wauchob’s design, lending it lightness and movement. A stole made of these avian treasures that can be styled in various ways (trailing or wrapped) is attached to a sharply-cut evening jacket. An abbreviated cami-top that combines plumes and a pouf-like volume is shown with cropped pants and accessorized with masculine-style brogues developed in collaboration with British bespoke shoemaker George Cleverly.
Other delights in the collection include jewelry by Joy BC (aka Joy Bonfield–Colombara), a knit tank with chain lariat at the back, and hand-embroidered feather wristlets with button closures, which can be worn alone, over sleeves. T. S. Eliot wrote of the world ending “Not with a bang with a whimper.” In contrast, fashion is finally noticing that Wauchob creates a-ha moments with whispers rather than shouts.
19 February 2024
It was clear from her spring collection that Sharon Wauchob has achieved a state of flow. Better yet, she has taken that transcendent fluidity between body and mind and translated it into garments that caress the wearer and interact with the air. “We edited it really solidly, and each step after was quite quick and unapologetic,” said the designer on a call. “I feel at the moment, especially with what we’re doing, the clarity has to be there…the customers want to know how to use it.”The entire collection, which was largely made using archival silks, some mixed with cotton, others with a papery technical finish (see the trench), oozed confidence without a trace of stridency. The image of a spiderweb, gossamer yet strong, came to mind. That Wauchob can conjure such a feeling using the most ethereal materials—chiffon as delicate as a shadow, French lace, ostrich feathers, and résille nets—is a testament to her skill and to her experience.Having established her brand in 1998, this independent Irish designer is coming into her own. “We’re always told the same things, like ‘Do what you believe in,’ but it’s so hard to keep that focus. I think being a little bit more mature helps with that; I’m much better at it now than I used to be,” said Wauchob. “We have been persevering, and so it does work to keep doing what you believe in.” As the designer expands her wholesale business and adds direct-to-consumer options, she’s sure to attract acolytes. Hers are thoughtful, well-made clothes that respect tradition yet are totally of the now.Wauchob said she’s working more intuitively, and it was easy to sense that. For spring she started with the idea that “luxury doesn’t have to be an extreme proposition” and challenged herself to “achieve that irreverent balance between casual elegance and modern sensibility.” One of the ways she did so was to blow up a scrunchie (shades of irony here) into a sort of sculptural prop that could be worn as a peplum belt or sash. (“And I’m not a scrunchie girl at all,” Wauchob emphasized.) In look 2, this piece creates a break in a linear silhouette created by a white camisole and tailored pants cut on a curve. (Wauchob works with Savile Row–trained artisans in England.) Smaller feathered “scrunchies” pushed up to the elbow transformed a silk T-shirt into a statement piece. An angelic top with floating streamers made use of the spiral cuts Wauchob has developed over time.
15 September 2023
“It just felt right not to be so heavy this season,” said Sharon Wauchob of her ethereal fall collection. At this point in her career, the Irish designer could be floating along on autopilot, but she’s producing some of her strongest work ever, paring things back so all that’s left is essential, poetic, and resolutely modern. The irony (if that’s the right word here) is that this modernity is achieved using age-old couture techniques. A beaded sequin skirt, shiny as caviar, was all worked by hand. And a lace storm cloud of a bra top was inspired by 19th century hairnets; Wauchob had the exact lace reproduced from a historical sample.A “boudoir” theme started to gather steam in New York, but at Wauchob touches of lace and net are far from tawdry or retro, instead they are defined by airiness. Within this fall collection was a capsule of lingerie/pajama pieces, all beautifully constructed. A to-the-floor-skirt in tulle, Wauchob explained, was “cut on the circle, but with interlinking bias circles to get the shape.” It throws shadows of Vionnet, or the ’90s, depending on your perspective. The camis were cut on the bias and double layered. Cut short, they revealed a stretch of skin between the underbust and waist.The idea of emergence was at play here, and, as always, motion, too. Fringe and feathers are alive materials that bounce and sway in ways that cannot be controlled. The designer let go in other ways for fall, introducing multi-purpose accessories like a silk-velvet hood and feathered sleeves (think of a large stole with arms) that could be layered over a traditional tuxedo jacket, say, to play with hard/soft, feminine/masculine contrasts. “Layering I felt was more interesting than overdesigning,” Wauchob said. Indeed.The designer is looking towards creating a retail experience for her customers and she’s taken that as an invitation to stretch herself: “For me it’s a learning process to venture into new territory at this stage,” she noted. Clearly Wauchob was holding the image of a customer close as she made this collection. (The same goes for makers; she found local production for the pajama pants and tops of wafty, sustainable silk.) These clothes boast an expert hand and a human touch; in turn they invite tactile engagement—a dance between fabric and skin.
17 February 2023
With the confidence that only experience can provide, Sharon Wauchob, who started her namesake brand 24 years ago, has arrived at a place of clarity, in terms of both her spring collection and her business strategy. The designer, known for the lingerie details of some of her designs, will soon introduce an innerwear collection, and by the looks of the lace camisole and diamanté satin bras in the look book, it will be be an exquisite one, informed, as everything Wauchob does, by her experience working in Paris. Her designs are defined by the tension between the satisfying structure of Savile Row tailoring and the ethereal lightness of couture materials and techniques.Like many designers, Wauchob works out her ideas in a natural colored toile, the couturiers’ blank page, as it were. This season, she wrote in her notes, “it felt right to continue the collection as we first experience it ourselves, but seldom execute. Without the aid or distracting optics of color and prints, we found an expression of strength in that rawness.” Examples of that quality are found in the unruly but elegant feathers that explode from the lapel of a Dietrich-worthy tuxedo; the incredible, wild textures created by the mix of hand-placed fringe and feathers on a silk slip, or embroidered on a floral lace. Despite the luxuriousness of these embellishments, the silhouettes and mood of the collection are minimal, restrained, assured. “Stripping back” and “taking away some of the noise,” as Wauchob put it on a call, was her focus when designing. She is also experimenting with new ways of selling, with plans to open a temporary retail space, which will allow her to interact directly with clients and offer bespoke services.The shapes and the types of embellishments in Wauchob’s spring collection will be familiar to fans, but there’s nothing retro to the mood of this relevant, woman-friendly lineup. “It’s really about the attitude… It’s not about ‘This is the key detail’ or ‘This is the key print,’” she says. “Girls who aren’t dress girls come to me for dresses.” Asked what the lure is, Wauchob ventures that it’s the freedom from restriction offered by her beautifully designed but not overly constructed pieces. There’s also the face of the awe-inspiring handwork, like hand-shredded and individually applied frills that add textural borders to a columnar slip.
21 September 2022
An old adage suggests that the Irish have “the gift of the gab.” If that’s so, Sharon Wauchob is the exception to the rule. Although this designer has plenty to crow about she’s always preferred to let her clothes do the talking. You wouldn’t know from looking, for example, that this season’s chic “shearling” is a responsible bonded material. And it’s a surprise to learn that a leather bomber and some luscious knitwear are resurfaced from Wauchob’s extensive archive.As the designer walked me virtually through the collection, the questions posed by the Museum of Modern Art in 1945 and 2017—“Are Clothes Modern?” and “Is Fashion Modern?”—popped into my head. Here, finally, the answer was a resounding yes. Outdated feminine ideals are still prevalent on the runway and the red carpet. Having worked in Paris, Wauchob is always striving to add what she calls “couture” touches to her ready-to-wear, and her focus on materials and make gives her thoughtful designs a sense of objectness. In theory, the primacy of the thing itself, rather than the imagery created around it, allows the wearer more room to actively insert themselves into a picture of their own imagining.That’s not to say Wauchob doesn’t have a well-defined aesthetic; she tends to a boy-meets-girl vibe, as exemplified by the pairing of an off-the-shoulder knit with low-slung tuxedo pants. This duality is often expressed through material contrasts; for fall she paired tweed with feathers and cashmere with lamé. Movement is another Wauchob hallmark; see how the silk pants swing under the substantial shearling topper. The billowing monastic dress in black is actually held at the waist. Such mastery of control and release not only defines Wauchob’s work as a whole, but the in-between world of today.
17 February 2022
“I think it still feels right to be a little bit more low-key,” says Sharon Wauchob on a call. Building on the lightness of her fall lineup, her spring collection approaches ethereality. Yet there’s no danger of this offering coming untethered and floating away into some fashion fantasy realm, because it’s so personal. “I wanted it to be something very sincere and real to me at this stage,” says Wauchob. “What am I doing this for? Because I want to be able to relate to it myself. It’s not just this abstract thing that I’m experimenting with.”The silhouettes the designer reworked for spring are known to all. The idea, she says, is taking something precious, “but making it really accessible in a raw but special way.” To that end, a T-shirt, rendered in the wispiest silk tulle, is transformed into something as magical as a butterfly wing. Pair it with matching floaty trousers (opaque through the hips) and Wauchob’s take on the piece of the season, the bra top. Hers is a jewel-like constellation of jet-black micro-sequins.For many years, Wauchob worked in Paris alongside couture artisans, and she’s increasingly exploring the decorative possibilities of handwork in her collections. This season she was thinking about “future heirlooms,” an idea that comes across most directly in a skirt hand-covered in vintage crystals, with little bits of uneven fringe. Making this piece, notes the designer, required a bit of confidence, “because it’s not so delicate, but a little bit ballsy—and I like that as well, you know, being irreverent with something very special.”But what qualifies as “special” in fashion today? According to street style and the red carpet, in-your-face looks that are colorful, brash, and body-revealing (and perhaps a reaction to the pandemic) seem to be the thing. In contrast, Wauchob, who has always been a proponent of “quiet,” has been asking herself, as she wrote in her show notes, “Are we dressing up for the public gaze—can we?—or are those moments more personal, almost secretive, to share with those closest to us?” This collection contains lots of sheer looks, and ones that are closer to the body, yet they don’t reveal themselves at a glance. The construction of some of the tulle pieces can only be seen, and appreciated, when held up to the light. “[My work has] never ever been about being sexy in the normal sense,” says Wauchob, a self-described feminist.
There is a sort of romanticism to the spring collection, but it’s less to do with aesthetics than with the love affair Wauchob has with her materials and her craft. Just as she worked with petites mains in Paris, so the designer is working with Savile Row–trained tailors now that she’s back in London. The collection needs structured pieces to balance the delicacy of treatments like Fortuny pleats. The presence of the hand on fabric is legible in a silvered antique lamé top. It’s there too in a “suspension dress” (where fabric hangs, quite literally, from a thread) that mirrors the fragile state of the world.
20 September 2021
For Sharon Wauchob, it’s been important to ensure any changes to her design process over the past year have remained as incremental and carefully managed as possible. “I don’t think the collections need to feel like a blank slate every season now, but a bit more of an evolution,” she says. As with last season, this evolution was partly prompted by the deep dives she’s been taking into her archive: reworking old shapes and repurposing the sumptuous textiles she accrued over her decades spent working in Paris.The fall collection sees Wauchob embracing something a little more playful—even, dare we say it, party-ready. What makes it unique is how Wauchob’s eye for opulence extends to the granular level. Individual crystals are embroidered onto wispy, diaphanous sheer silk dresses, the leftover raw threads sprouting from each glittering speckle like tiny strands of feather. “A little bitbrut, as the French might say,” Wauchob adds. A breathtaking mesh top is crafted from Swiss guipure lace, subjected to a calendaring process to create a supple, almost leathery quality. Meanwhile, further touches of glitz come courtesy of vintage jewelry thanks to Bulgari, or a crystal belt cinching the waist of a robe-like coat cut from crushed black silk.This painstaking attention to detail reflects her increasingly personal approach to design, again the result of this time spent looking back at her own history. (Wauchob mentions that she was thinking about clothes she wanted to wear herself this season, something that would never have occurred to her at the beginning of her career.) Alongside her ever-popular airy, draped gowns, there’s a growing emphasis on outerwear, most notably in the form of a cashmere coat featuring sleeves artfully knotted around the waist in an enveloping, protective gesture, and a cozy stole made from an unusual faux fur whose featherlight quality lends it an ethereal shimmer. Both have a practical feel that neatly balances out the more decadent moments of the eveningwear.“It felt good to be quite hands-on again. It was different, we were trying on the clothes ourselves, which is not a bad thing,” says Wauchob. “You end up looking at the nuts and bolts, which sometimes you forget about when it’s a big team.” As carefully considered as it might be, it’s Wauchob’s easy glamour and lightness of touch that gives the collection a sense of lift-off.
10 March 2021
Since moving her studio from Paris to London in 2016, Sharon Wauchob has blended the savoir faire of her years in the French capital with the quiet rigor of British heritage brands to clever and desirable effect. “I think it’s the same with any creative process, but I find it really surprising how physically moving [changes] your point of view,” says Wauchob. It would make sense, then, that the auspicious coincidence of her move to the countryside at the beginning of lockdown would crop up in her latest outing.Instead, this change of scenery was woven into the collection more subtly. “It’s a moment of huge change for the industry, so it’s difficult to say whether it’s due to that, or a personal thing,” she notes. After all, it’s her willingness to embrace contradictions that lends Wauchob’s world its curious appeal. Just take her latest offering: somewhere between the steely and the ethereal, the refined and roughly hewn; remaining wearable, but with just enough unpredictability so as to feel timely. As she describes it, in place of anything too literal—as with so many designers working within the parameters imposed on them by the pandemic—Wauchob was most inspired by the opportunity to dig through her archive.“It definitely gave me a chance to rethink what we had done in the past,” says Wauchob. “That might be things that we had glossed over, or had wanted to go deeper into but hadn’t had the chance, so I went back and focused more intensely on that.” A particularly ravishing black silk lace, sourced during Wauchob’s years in Paris, was here repurposed to create a delicate dress of sheer, tiered ruffles. Her experiments with texture also yielded impressive results, specifically in outerwear with fabrics pressed into rumpled pleats, a process that Wauchob describes as both “deformed and transformed.” In one look, a slinky hand-sequined skirt in a white-and-gray ombré peeks out from a rigid white coat, carrying all the evocative, ever-so-slightly disheveled glamour that has become Wauchob’s calling card. “I never want to be too precious,” she adds. “I like the accidental element—it makes it feel a bit more irreverent.”What also continues to work for Wauchob is her shrewd choice of collaborators as she expands beyond ready-to-wear.
The backbone of her razor-sharp coats and jackets comes courtesy of Norton & Sons, the Savile Row mainstay that sits a few doors down from where Wauchob first cut her teeth tailoring men’s suits while studying at Central Saint Martins in the early ’90s. So too does this season mark her second time partnering with Bulgari. Testament to Wauchob’s strength of vision is her ability to integrate the Italian house’s extravagant jewelry into her own, more subdued aesthetic.Finally, Wauchob took her first step into footwear, collaborating with the buzzy London accessories brand Neous on ballerina shoes crafted from gathered leather. It was a smart addition, both grounding the looks and lending them an unexpected, offbeat flavor. For all Wauchob’s delight in the accidental, when it comes to advancing her brand into its next chapter, her approach may be more intentional than she lets on. “I think creating and editing have to coexist,” as she herself puts it. “That’s the only way you get clearer about what you’re doing.”
19 September 2020
Sharon Wauchob decided to show her collection by appointment today in the lofty church in which she staged her runway presentation last season. The designer has been shaking up her usual routine in recent years, streamlining and focusing the output of her brand while exploring new modes of communication. What was once a largely wholesale business is now split 50/50 between that and selling direct to consumer.Now that she has their ears and eyes, Wauchob is using the feedback from the women who wear her clothes to evolve her collections. For starters, she modified the feathered and fringed silk party dresses of seasons past to a more universally flattering knee-length silhouette. The mannish black evening suiting that Wauchob is known for came with new trimmings for fall, including detachable satin muffs in vibrant fire-engine red. There were more sinuous lines in the mix too, with gently corseted jackets and slinky hobble skirts that recalled Wauchob’s earlier work.The Irish designer picked up her affinity for couture in Paris, where she lived before moving to London a few years ago. She worked with a new generation of young couturiers on the embroidery of antique crystals that embellished her new black and white evening trench coats and tunics. Whether on the shop floor or in the privacy of her studio, that kind of subtly-disheveled-yet-modern approach to glamour is likely to attract the right attention.
17 February 2020