Hard Folk. Chopova Lowena SS24

September 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Chopova Lowena, a relatively young brand, is stomping its way through a period of economic gloom, in a country severely hamstrung by the after-effects of Brexit and the pandemic, with good humor, common sense, and clever ideas. Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena’s weakness for folkloric whimsy with a streetwise swagger speaks for itself and keeps on enchanting the clients. Extra spice came courtesy of the casting, which took in friends, colleagues, acquaintances, plus mothers and brothers and boyfriends, resulting in a compelling line-up of characters you simply couldn’t take your eyes off. For their spring-summer 2024, the designers had chosen the skatepark as an homage to the “skater boy you love” (that’s Bulgaria-born, New Jersey-raised Chopova) “or the boy you want to be” (Somerset-raised tomboy Lowena-Irons). Tony Hawk made his presence felt in plaid pajama pants, graphic zip-up hoodies, board shorts and studded Ugg boots, part of a collaboration with the brand. The rest referenced the ancient Flora Day festival, held every May in the village of Helston in Cornwall, on England’s wild south-west coast. Comprising numerous processions and dances, including mermaids and maidens, angels and devils, it manifested in hand-embroidered broderie anglaise dresses, thick leather belts and a pair of knickers adorned with hundreds of beads and charms, and a particularly fabulous jacket made of white crispy ribbons like those you’d see on draped across a wedding car.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Strangeness In The Mundane. Jw Anderson SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Finally, a collection this season that makes the viewer truly wonder. Nobody transforms the mundane into extraordinary like Jonathan Anderson. Plasticine – that’s what the blue hoodie and white shorts were molded from at the beginning of the JW Anderson spring-summer 2024 fashion show in London. Anderson discovered that Plasticine is still being manufactured in Northern Ireland, the place of his birth, plus it makes adults smile as much now as back in their childhoods. That was an emblematic starter for a collection that had Anderson’s collection circling back to the youth-based energy of his brand. “It was kind of re-going back to find a new path,” he said. In the summer he “saw all these girls and boys hanging out wearing biker jackets and cargos.” Street observation – seeing the generic clothes young people really wear, but with a different attitude in each generation – put him in the mood to think about “what happens when you focus on reduction. It wasn’t about a lot of tricks. Kind of a cleanser.” Adding glamour to the MA-1 archetype by inflating it as a cocoon and having feathers explode from the seams was another cheerful moment, equally beautiful. And putting something that might have been a Hula-Hoop up the skirt of a knitted dress. Playfulness balanced with practicality might be a way to sum it up. Love!

Behind The Scenes. Molly Goddard SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

This season, Molly Goddard played with the notion of a “behind the scenes” moment: what’s happening behind the surface, or closed doors or… the clothes. The spring-summer 2024 show took place at Christie’s auction house on King Street, the other occasions upon which the designer would tend to visit were during the set up of displays. She elaborated: “When there are these masterpieces just lying on the floor: it’s kind of amazing to see and very exciting, which I guess in some way is connected to the collection.” Goddard fashioned a fair few masterpieces of her own in a lineup that focused on nudging the mechanics of garments to the surface, turning them inside out in order to create a patina of production. She said she’d done her research in the National Theatre Costume Hire, examining the stitched clockwork of garments ranging in style from Regency to contemporary. Long skirts were shirred at the hip to create drape down to edged froths of pale ruffled petticoat. The trademark tulle skirts were teamed with loosely corseted tops whose sheerness exposed the geography of boning and corsetry that defined their gentle geography. A dusty pink woolen cardigan was edged with a two-inch strip of satin, like some old granny blanket left bundled in the cupboard of a spare room. Washed out red rose prints used on more skirts and knitted into another cardigan – magenta paneled at the shoulder – added to the sense of comfortable, domestic nostalgia. A precise excavation of the deeply familiar but also overlooked, this was a quietly masterful collection. Said Goddard: “What I enjoy most is when I get really stuck in to how to make clothes; the techniques and the fabrics and the fit.” That pleasure in Goddard’s process was evident in its result.

Fetishization of Pain. Mowalola SS24

September 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Mowalola Ogunlesi delivered a sharp start of London Fashion Week. Mowalola, the brand, is fast, furious, and at times obscene, but in a creatively vital way. Backstage of her spring-summer 2024 show, the designer, said the collection had been sparked by her first-ever viewing of David Cronenberg’s Crash. “I was really excited by the fetishization of pain through crashing,” she said. It prompted her to imagine “a whole universe that resides on the street,” filtered through a prism of ecstatic jeopardy. But Mowalola doesn’t stick to one reference. Masturbating anime girl prints; off-the-shoulder bombers with faux Highway Patrol patches; thigh-highs and micro skirts inspired by street walkers. A lot of stuff that Ogulensi’s customers will love. All that, like the excellent dirty denims, seemed to emanate a conceptual solar system adjacent to some of Glenn Martens’s work at Diesel. The pants that flashed cracks at the back and crotch hairlines were maybe subject to the influence of Alexander McQueen’s gravity. This was good company to keep: however the gartered, bisected pants and skirts, now a Mowalola signature, were all Ogunlesi’s own. The flags-of-the world theme was another highlight. This also ran into a poignant EU skirt meets Union Jack cap look. The extreme contrast of volumes in some sportswear looks made the generic appear particular.

Community. Martine Rose SS24

June 13, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The spring-summer 2024 menswear fashion month has kicked off with Martine Rose‘s dynamic fashion show in London. “Before there were actual club venues as such, people from so many communities co-opted community centers and youth clubs to put on their club nights. All over London, wherever waves of immigrants have come in, you saw them – West Indian, Turkish, Polish, Irish – everyone has had their own community centers. They’re really important, the life-blood, ” Rose said. ”And this one – at St Joseph’s Parish Centre – is untouched. I thought it would be fun for people to sit down, have a drink, and feel pulled into participating in something.” Her living celebration of London subcultural codes opened on a blast of reggae. Out walked the totally believable Martine Rose cast of characters in clothes layered in her subversively kinky takes on men’s and womenswear. “I love playing with gender lines. I find it very sexy – I love men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes. It’s things that I’ve played with a long time. And I think it’s a real proposition. Not a gimmick, you know, a genuine proposal.”

Sure enough, there was a complete and recognizable wardrobe of recurring Rose signatures – her oversized tailored jackets, voluminous floor-sweeping coats, and reappropriated hi-viz workwear and sportswear. To give it a sense of lived-in ownership, she used worn-in, washed, and patinated materials.“Because I never like it when things look new. There’s a kind of make-do-and-mend – like denim we patched with gaffer tape,” she explained. Rose developed the hunched-forward shouderline of women’s leather jackets from looking at the posture of motorbike-riders. Her ideas seem always to come up through those kinds of socially-observed transferences—from the pre-existing, from gestures or half-dressed slip-ups. Her women’s skirts were inside out, with pleats bursting from under linings, creating a cool volume. Then there were her wicked twists of humor. “For menswear, I always like this tension between two poles. I’m using quite classic things like tailoring and sportswear, but the other pole has to be quite far apart. So I was looking at quite stately lady things, like Barbour jackets cut on a ’50s women’s a-line, corsetry, and pearls.” And all of a sudden, you glimpse a very British class joke going on.