Pleasure. Christopher Kane AW23

February 20, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.
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A Moment for Retrospection. JW Anderson AW23

February 20, 2023February 20, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jonathan Anderson isn’t really a designer who takes a look back at his previous work, but for JW Anderson‘s autumn-winter 2023 collection, he had a moment of retrospection. He came about it through a collaboration, or rather a creative dialogue, with the Scottish choreographer Michael Clark, whose famed subversive performances blurred the lines between ballet, gay nightlife, and fashion performance in the early 1980s. The giant billboard graphic of a penis as the show’s venue was part of that conversation. “In September of last year, we had a conversation with Michael, we’ve been trying to do something for while – and while looking through his archive, I was like, ‘Well, I can’t look through someone else’s archive without looking through my own. And I decided to take one element from every single collection of the last 15 years and try to work out a way in which you would merge two archives.” Clark, he added, isn’t crazy about looking back, and nor is he – but he forced himself. “I wanted something which was about how do you kind of reconcile the past, and how do you deal with what you have done, because ultimately the job of a designer is going through a series of rejections of things. And it was really nice to kind of work out ways in which you could break everything. And maybe improve on them.” Fans of Anderson will now get a chance to get their hands on revisited reissues of his greatest hits, like the kangaroo-pocketed bustiers that now come in fake furry chenille. His big experimental voluminous shapes, coats in subverted country checks, and bound-arm knits came out, interspersed with tributes to his hero. At one point, a best-seller JWA anchor-logo sailor stripe t-shirt was simply over-printed with the name Michael Clark in luminous green lettering. The ability to create great merchandise while often doing things that will fire the internet at the same time has always been central to Anderson’s talent, and has sent him right to the top in Paris with his role at Loewe as one of the most significant designers of our times. It had been fun to look back, before moving on, he remarked.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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End Time. Mowalola AW23

February 20, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

“It’s about the collapse of society. What I envision people wearing at the end time,” said Mowalola Ogunlesi of her sharp and urgent autumn-winter 2023 collection. That collapse’s trigger, she reckoned, might be sparked by the membrane that now connects us all: “low-key we’re literally in the last fight between life and tech. And I feel like a lot of corporations are gaining massive power over a lot of things.” Mowalola‘s fashion dystopia speaks volumes about our society today. But it also offers clothes suited for tumultuous times. The ingeniously-gartered, pants-down jeans and skirt; the crotch-hands shorts, pants, and skirts; the Insert Disc Here dress; and the closing series of dancehall fits all pointed to that, as did the masks. Said Ogunlesi of these: “it’s about an aspect of life that is kind of put in the dark, which is our true desires. A lot of people don’t celebrate them. You have politicians who do things, and when it comes out, they act like it wasn’t them.” There will always be traction for a brand built in youth that throws barbs at the hypocrisy of the elders and which champions freedom of expression in resistance to systems.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Fetish For Glamour. Richard Quinn AW23

February 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The scent of fresh flowers wafting through the portal into Richard Quinn’s autumn-winter 2023 set was already a near sensory overload. Followed by a few latex-clad ballet cats posing like brand mascots, it was clear it’s going to be another Quinn collection clashing the glamorous with fetishistic. What could have been a loud, possibly bombastically sensational occasion turned out to be as Quinn put it later, “something really ethereal. We’ve been looking at how we can elevate what we do. We’ve looked back at Chanel and Dior in the ’80s and ’90s – and they had that sense of poise and grace.” Quinn has been captivated by classic Parisian haute couture since he was a BA print student. He shot his first graduation collection of flower-painted 1950s crinolines on a set with a ladder, Irving Penn-style. All of his shows since have been an exaggeration of the silhouettes of that era, printed with a riot of colorful flowers, frequently subverted with gimp-suits and masked faces. In general, I thought latest collection looked as if Erdem and Balenciaga’s Demna had a fashion baby. There were neat floral dresses, and there were some eye-popping, dramatic moments, too, with a couture twist. But I’ve got no clue where is the actual Richard Quinn in all this mix (except for the florals).

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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You Reap What You Sow. Simone Rocha AW23

February 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For autumn-winter 2023, Simone Rocha conjured a moody, romantic and very symbolic collection. Lughnasadh is the Irish harvest festival that goes back to pagan times, and tangentially about which Brian Friel wrote a great play. Before Christianity’s arrival and ever since, but differently, it has acted as a counterpoint to Beltane: a moment to offer thanks for summer’s bounty, and a moment for communities to commingle. Simone Rocha used Lughnasadh as a vehicle for a forward expansion of her design language. “I started looking into the rituals of relationships, because I wanted to continue to show women and men together: how they correspond,” said Rocha before the show. The designer’s coming together for harvest, to reap what had earlier been sown, started with a three part sunrise of all-gold womenswear looks in cloque whose surface was puckered like a heap of matured wheat-seed. These were in typically bounteous silhouettes, full in arm and skirt. Spaced around them were darker looks including one menswear ensemble consistent with a classically cut black car coat over a nappa pant. Perry Ogden wore a fine black double breasted top coat in Linton tweed cut with lurex. As the looks unfolded and the tempo of the Celtic soundtrack gathered melodic urgency, the collection was getting better and better. The red ribbons that fell from the hair, garments, and sometimes eyes of certain models were meant to represent blood traditionally daubed on children’s faces to ward off ill spirits and bad luck. The raffia stuffed into and supporting a series of intricately felt-embroidered, mostly womenswear lace gowns – rural crinolines! – spoke of hay bales productively disordered. These carried a richly contradictory tension between the ostensible primness of silhouette and the tumbled suggestion of their fabrication. Women’s slip dresses and underpinnings, and a taut bungee tank top for men served to emphasize the bodies within. Two final all-raffia dresses were totemic. There were some other wonderfully subtle technical details, crossed nylon webbing on jacket arms and that bungee tank, that the designer happily conceded had entered her lexicon thanks to her time working with Moncler: “It made me much more appreciative of the technicality of garments.” Standing stone graphics and new plays on Rocha’s logo by a group of friend creatives added extra texture to a collection that was already aflame with it. One word: brilliant.