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).
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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.
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“I wanted to go back to a place of it feeling very simple. Like it was in the beginning. Just a little bit more honest. Fundamental, kind of, saying, ‘this is our reality’… basically, I’m feeling very stubborn.” To achieve that, Molly Goddard invited her fashion show guests into her Bethnal Green studio, her work home of five years. “What I found the biggest challenge of the season was not doing the thing that actually comes to me easiest, which is like a big, bright, colorful, enormous showstopper,” said the designer. This season, she used her signature material – tulle – in much more versatile and casually applicable forms. Additionally she deployed her knitwear mindset to create texture by manipulating the warp and weft of silhouette and fabrication. Grosgrain ribbon was horizontally integrated into handsome topcoats and blazers in blue and gray that resembled cleverly rethought prep school blazers (it kind of felt very Miu Miu). Later, when she succumbed to tulle, more ribbons acted to shape the silhouette and create pattern. There was tulle too in a couple of narrow-skirted leopard-print pieces including a pink-tinted skirt, which worn beneath a blue blazer and a crewneck scarlet knit set with a design inspired by a vintage flyer from Kensington Market had a cutely skewed preppiness to it. When the voluminous showstopper came at the last, it was cut in a pale gray fabric and cut on the bias – a pointedly uncolorful showstopper. “I think I’ve just felt a little bit freaked out by the fashion world recently. It’s easy to get so pushed along, and strung along, with the whole show of it.” By pushing back – and pulling the guests all out east London – Goddard claimed her agency and delivered a collection worked on her own terms.
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Remember the 1995 documentary Catwalk, which followed Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss through the fashion month? That film captured not only the quintessence of 1990s cool, but also an image of model-hood filled with friendship, fun and mutual support. Somehow, Conner Ives managed to convey that fleating feeling in his London Fashion Week collection – and it didn’t feel forced, which is the most amazing thing. While last season’s eclectic extravaganza proved Ives can do more than just the spliced T-shirt dresses that earned him a following while still a student at Central Saint Martins, the 26-year-old designer explained that he wanted to mature things with this collection. Titled Magnolia after Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling 1999 film charting the lives and loves of a disparate group of Angelenos, it contained all of the greatest hits of Ives’s collections thus far: slinky fringed skirts made from upcycled piano scarves; diaphanous Lilith Fair slip dresses with sheer ruffles; and yes, those vintage T-shirts, here transformed into a bias-cut camisole dress trimmed with black lace. To Ives’s point, there were a few more grown-up tricks in the mix too, including a handful of retro silk button-downs and tailored trousers, along with Ally McBeal-core minimalist tailoring in muted shades of green and gray. There was also fun to be had: not least in the dizzying soundtrack, which cycled relentlessly through everything from Lil Mama’s Lip Gloss to the opening theme of Psycho. And as with last season’s smorgasbord of winking references to everything from reality TV to film history, part of the thrill was engaging with Ives’s Guess Who?game of pop culture icons from across the decades. The second look was a Kate Moss-inspired “Glasto girl” trudging through the mud in a fur gilet and Hunter wellies, while other looks paid homage to the “shiny set” of New York society women who would descend on the Paris couture shows each season, such as C.Z. Guest and Nan Kempner. Most bonkers of all was the bridal look at the end: a tongue-in-cheek nod to a wedding dress from the Lindsay Lohan remake of The Parent Trap (as well as the highly questionable top hat-veil hybrid that remains seared onto the retinas of all who have seen it). “That was really something where I was like: This is so fucking ridiculous,” Ives added, with a grin. Ives may have a winning sense of humor, but between all those granola girls and Coyote Ugly bartenders and new-age mystics with agate pendants swinging over their jeans, there was a method in the madness. Notably, a series of looks that was plumbed from the depths of Ives’s encyclopedic knowledge of ’90s and ’00s fashion: the bulbous trapeze coats, horse-riding hats, and platform Mary Janes of Nicolas Ghesquière’s influential autumn 2006 collection for Balenciaga. “I remember being a 10-year-old kid looking at that collection, having stolen a magazine from my mom’s bathroom,” Ives said. The designer is, above all else, a true fashion fanboy and it translates palpably through the clothes. “I want to emphasize that same guttural feeling I felt when I was 10 years old looking at that magazine,” he said. “I’m aware of how schlocky that sounds, but it feels messy and human and real, and I think that’s more interesting than painting some pristine picture of what fashion should be like.”
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London Fashion Week started with a moving memorial service for Vivienne Westwood. The spirit of the Dame is in the air, and it just makes you reflect on how the late designer pushed London to being the place for emerging designers with off-kilter style to start their careers and evolve. Like Dimitra Petsa, who with every season makes the fashion industry fall harder in love with her ethereal world. Inspired by her Greek heritage and its ancient mythologies, Di Petsa‘s designer looked to the story of Persephone for autumn-winter 2023. For those unfamiliar: she was the daughter of the goddess Demeter, who was abducted by Hades, and then later became the queen of the underworld. With the collection, titled Breaking and Healing, the designer wanted to honor the growth and transformation that Persephone has experienced. Petsa was on her A-game with her latest offering, whether it was her popular wet-look illusion dresses, which have been elevated in Lycra and silks in dark hues, or the placements of healing crystals like clear quartz – to encourage “tenderness, and letting go” – as decorative features on dress straps and headdresses. Elsewhere, paneled leather and velvet were sensuously placed like mosaics on mesh dresses, a new technique for the brand. In a continuation from last season, Petsa developed new twists on maternity styles, only this time, certain pieces were designed for those who want to be “pregnant with themselves,” via corseted hand-embroidered bumps. Knitted denim separates with frayed panels inserted vertically also stood out as a strong moment. For the finale, she showed a cut-out silk chiffon dress that featured corset boning wings, a silhouette that elevated (quite literally) her otherworldly sensibilities.
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