Swan Lake. Magda Butrym SS24

June 26, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Magda Butrym’s elevated resort 2024 collection reflects the brand’s expanding vocabulary which is a clash of romanticism, femininity and assertiveness. Pure romance was conveyed in the pink column dresses with draped bustiers and shoulder-straps in rose-like shapes. Hot take on femininity can be seen in the gorgeous “revenge” LBD with v-neckline and the sheer knitted gown with hand-crotcheted inserts around the bust. Power-dressing – Butrym’s latest specialty that she keeps on refining – informed the oversized tailoring that took clues from masculine proportions, as well as in the all-leather separates (see the jacket with furry collar!). But the ultimate hero piece status belongs to the silver evening dress, wholesomely splashed with sequins and appliquéd with metallic florals. Magda Butrym wouldn’t be Magda Butrym without bold accessories with – you guessed it – flowers as the main characters. This time, the Polish designer mixes her signature blooms with XXL pearls, which appear on stiletto heels and in the Audrey Hepburn-approved chokers. As always, Butrym’s dream closet oozes with pure chic.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Heart Beat. Marine Serre SS24

June 25, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Marine Serre‘s co-ed spring-summer 2024 line-up was pretty loaded with musicians: Teyana Taylor, Noah Cyrus, Miguel, Brooke Candy, and Sevdaliza all walked the show, turning the presentation into quite a star-studded affair. The latest offering was classic Serre, including patchwork graphic pieces, cutout dresses, full patterned outfits, and that signature crescent moon motif. As usual, all garments were made from upcycled, deadstock materials, making the French designer still one of the most uncompromisingly sustainability-forward name in fashion. The collection spoke to the label’s essence of marrying couture elements with sportswear feels, underscored by that familiar wild, haphazard energy that garnered its cult following. Titled “Heart Beat” (with the actual rhythm joining the show’s soundtrack), this fashion show bumped with charisma.

Lightness. Lemaire SS24

June 23, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

As the models arrived at the expansive Lemaire runway – an enclosed university parvis accompanied by a score composed of rain, city sounds and birds – looking this way and that, walking with purpose, their light, tonal layers were primed for a summer afternoon downpour. And for all their stylistic idiosyncrasies, they could have belonged in Paris, but also Vietnam, where a recent trip inspired Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran to explore how travel encourages a more deliberate rapport with what we wear. “We like to design from reality,” said Lemaire. “Like everyone, we’re experiencing global warming and the need for lighter fabric, lighter clothes, protection pieces – and we try to bring that functionality to our work.” Tran noted how this body of work is currently full of archetypal shapes – twisted, balloon, boxy – that can be revisited season after season. These designs are already so elemental and timeless that adjustments need only be incremental to register as fresh. “It’s just about adding layers that evolve with time,” she said.

The palette brought added dimension through an alluring spectrum spanning earthy, fleshy, inky, and airy. Two unassuming prints – a dark stripe and a faded floral – made the lineup feel believable, less rigid. But to see a sea of sameness would be missing the Lemaire approach altogether. “What we like to do is present characters and not just themes,” Lemaire said, noting that they spend considerable time on casting. “We want [the models] to feel credible. For us, style is about that… when there is a coherence of the personality and outfit.” For the designers, the intention in every collection – but particularly in this one – was about seeing the clothes in the street. “What we’re interested in is to try and embellish reality. We should learn to look at reality, so we start by that… and hopefully we end with looking like a better version of ourselves,” Lemaire summed up.

All The Beauty and The Bloodshed. Christopher Kane Resort 2024

June 22, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

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.

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.