We’re so lucky to see Christopher Kane back in the game. Fashion really missed his highly erotic, quirky unobviousness. And London Fashion Week was in a dire need for a good debut – so the Mulberry appointment couldn’t make more sense.
Kane kicked off this new chapter with a refreshing clean slate, brushing away the brand’s dusty, boho-ish residue and repositioning it as the cool thing. Wasn’t that always the point of Mulberry bags and their It-girl appeal? The designer came up with very, very cool-looking leathers – from minimal black dresses to substantial coats – signalling Mulberry’s new ambition to become London’s go-to name for leather, just as Bottega Veneta is in Milan. What worked especially well were the countryside-perfect essentials, purified to their core: a checked short-sleeved shirt, a proper down jacket, a classic V-neck sweater. Grounded clothes, subtly tweaked in proportion in that very Christopher Kane kind of sexy way.
I even loved the exaggeration of the logo sweatshirt, worn with a white pencil skirt and a pair of pumps. It felt punchy and cheeky. Brands like Mulberry are among the hardest to revive, but Kane has laid some very solid foundations for making this work.
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Yesterday’s news of Christopher Kane entering administration and considering selling his namesake label make you realize that in this industry, truly inventive creatives have to struggle, while others get unlimited budgets and press just… because. It’s no news that running an independent creative fashion label in London is practically impossible, but the vision of Kane exiting fashion is just heartbreaking. His knack for wickedly original, sometimes even disturbing pairings of strange materials and references has earned him a reputation of a playful conjurer who with grace combines non-obvious sexiness with contemporary chic. Hopefully, the designer will find a financial solution similar to Roland Mouret, another significant London-based designer, and will continue designing under his own name with new, supportive partners behind his back.
If resort 2024 is actually the last Christopher Kane collection we will ever see, then it’s exemplary of the designer’s unique fashion vocabulary. This line-up is packed with chic-funny-simple evening ideas that look like a joy to wear. Should you detect a ’50s/’80s post-punk New Wave-ish vibe coming off it, you’re not wrong. As ever, behind every brilliant Christopher Kane party-trick, there lies something darker. This time, Christopher and his sister, Tammy, had been watching All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the documentary about Nan Goldin that weaves her groundbreaking ’70s and ’80s photography into footage of her campaign of protest against the Sackler family’s sponsorship of major museums and galleries (The Sacklers own Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company whose main drug is the opioid Oxycontin). It struck them that the connection between the forces of super-wealth at one end of society, and the most deprived at the other were stingingly present – in the clothes. It was the sight of the cocktail dresses, lingerie, and scrappy gowns worn by Goldin’s penniless junkie LGBTQ friends that resonated. “The reason they looked so amazing in their poverty is that they were wearing second-hand and discarded clothes thrown out by the wealthy – couture, designer clothes from the ’40s and ’50s”. For them, that fit with their childhood and teenage memories of seeing the deprivation of communities in the post-industrial Glaswegian conurbation they grew up amongst. It took them back to remembering the glamour of the neatly-dressed barmaids serving in Working Men’s Clubs in the mid-to-late ’80s—another source for the sexy synthetic fitted dresses they conspired on in this collection. The subversive references they use aren’t at all visible, of course. What Kane always does is to turn the brew of associations into relevant fashion. Really, not many contemporary designers have that skill.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram! By the way, did you know that I’ve started a newsletter called Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
Sexuality is the focus point behind every Christopher Kane collection, and he manages to always approach it in a strikingly different, intriguing way. This time, the notion of it was amplified as a recording of a cat purring in the show’s soundtrack, a sensual metaphor for female pleasure. Animal instincts, biology, his working class Glaswegian school days, and, lately, artificial intelligence are all wrapped up in the matrix of Kane’s imagination. At a moment when it feels as if fashion ought to be going towards something cleaner and sharper, there he was, cutting plain gray school uniform shifts, but with stiff geometric upstanding collars that he later alarmingly called “chopping boards.” Then, his grappling with nature wasn’t all it seemed, either. There were pretty micro-flowers and solitary daisy embroideries he attributed to his championing of ordinary urban plants that “grow through concrete,” of the sort he saw growing up in a working class conurbation outside Glasgow. And then, there were his animal prints – overlapping hyper-real images of chicks, piglets, and rats (a TW moment for me) – on stretch jersey body-con dresses. It turned out, when quizzed backstage, that Kane had designed them with AI. “What you do is speak to it, give very specific descriptions, and then it comes up with it.”There are always some things in Christopher Kane’s work which feel a bit covertly disturbing or off – it wouldn’t have its weird originality if it didn’t. What’s for sure, he’s never someone who concocts things for the sake of instant public notoriety and clickbait. What he’s really about is being a designer of hot clothes that give women the chance to have a really great time with fashion.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
No one does “sex” and “sexy” like Chistopher Kane. His pre-fall 2023 is yet another reminder that the London-based designer owns this territory. The collection’s main character is a buckled strap. Broad, big, buckled straps are bound around the shoulders, necks, and hemlines of mini-shifts and coats. In one case they formed the entire upper body of a dress. Bondage and fetish might be the words we’d automatically reach for here, but not so fast. To Kane, the heavy-duty strapping, combined with reflective yellow, neon green, and orange fabric is more bound up with “uniforms, security, police women, and school lolly-pop ladies.” This season the designer indulged himself with circular cutouts, creating some of the most captivating eveningwear of the season. Circles roll through the naked waist of a long black column, and then wickedly expose two half-moons of flesh above a built-in bra. Kane points out that the collection will start dropping in April, so he’s also found room for “clothes to wear to weddings, cocktail parties, the things you need for summer.” There are little white dresses decorated with hand-drawn micro-flowers, patchworked from organic-shaped “blobs.” Flounced skirts in highlighter orange or lime have hems which can either be buttoned up in front, or left long. All-in-all, it’s a collection that covers a lot of bases, yet still looks inimitably Christopher Kane. By now, he’s accumulated a big playbook to draw on.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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