Anti-Hero. Talia Byre AW23

February 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Talia Byre is a designer worth keeping on your fashion radar. For autumn-winter 2023, the London-based designer found inspiration in the leading women of films like The Graduate and Funny Girl, and wanted to celebrate the ‘anti-hero’ with her latest offering. “The person I’m designing for is brash, greedy, selfish; all of what’s perceived as the worst traits to have,” she said in a preview. “But what’s great about them is that they’re also strong and independent – it’s their way of saying a big ‘fuck you’ to society.” The collection explored the sort of wardrobe that an anti-hero figure would aspire to own. There was a duality of toughness while retaining sensuality, whether in the form of screen-printed leopard patterns on wool and cashmere pieces, or figure-hugging maxi dresses in black and dark cherry brown. “This season, sexiness is expressed more subtly,” Byre said. “However, a look can unravel into more daring silhouettes with the undoing of a single button.” The tailored coats were particularly strong – one in navy wool with a dangerously high slit up the back, and another featuring a hood constructed from waterproof technical fabric. A cotton poplin shirt dress with woven stripes, a dramatically cinched waist-line, and voluminous sleeves was also worth noting.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The Man And The Sea. S.S. Daley AW23

February 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Sir Ian McKellen emerged from the shadows to begin the S.S. Daley autumn-winter 2023 show in a silk sailor’s cap and a navy peacoat decorated with a nude male form. Reciting one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, his rich Shakespearean lilt spoke of mighty waves and roaring voices, delivered with the kind of presence that comes from a lifetime treading the boards. So far, so Steven Stokey-Daley: the designer has woven the energy of live performance into all three of his previous shows. But it turns out that Stokey-Daley was initially planning to do away with the theatrics completely this season, until McKellen unexpectedly reached out to the designer and the idea of him opening the show sprung up. “You don’t say no to Sir Ian McKellen,” said Stokey-Daley at a preview before the show. “To be honest, I couldn’t really believe it.” Given Stokey-Daley’s meteoric rise over the past two-and-a-half years, he shouldn’t be so surprised. The S.S. Daley whirlwind began in 2020 when he sent a portfolio of his graduate collection to stylist Harry Lambert, who then dressed his client Harry Styles in a full look for his “Golden” music video. From there, attention exploded, culminating in Stokey-Daley taking home the LVMH Prize and the emerging designer gong at the British Fashion Awards last year in quick succession. It was only after his show this past September, Stokey-Daley explains, that he was able to pause and fully take stock of his rapid ascent – and he found himself feeling strangely deflated. “Everything was great on paper, but I felt like, post-LVMH Prize, I had a lot to prove,” Stokey-Daley said. He felt he should reintroduce the brand with a bang last season and scaled up his runway experience, with an ambitious set inspired by Sissinghurst Castle Gardens. His initial urge to do without the theatrical bells and whistles this time was partly in response to that, channeling this emotional turbulence into artfully disheveled, navy-inspired clothes that trailed with loose strings of thread and lengths of knitted bunting, as if the models been dragged from a shipwreck. “This collection is more of a reflection of my state of mind than anything I’ve done before,” he said.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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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.