After eighteen months of pixelated fashion, where videos had replaced catwalks, London fashion week found, from September 17 to 21, contact with the three-dimensional world. If the press and Asian buyers have not made the trip, Americans and Europeans are back. “There has been so much waiting that the reunion is all the more optimistic. Professionals could no longer be just faces on screens. More than ever, we feel that fashion is above all a community of exchanges ”says Caroline Rush, the managing director of the British Fashion Council, all smiles. However, in London, the classic parade – a seven-minute parade in front of seated guests – is no longer totally up to date. As if they feared that the public would remain anesthetized (as in front of a screen), the designers understood that the show, face-to-face, had to be more alive than before.
At Roksanda Ilincic, which invites for noon to the lush Kensington Gardens, spiral dresses, flowing tunics in fuchsia, purple, orange recycled taffeta, or sand coats in patchwork of striped fabrics, are highlighted by performers choreographed by the artist Holly Blakey. In turn, they dance, flutter barefoot, slip without warning between two guests. Some movement !
In the aquatic center, designed by Zaha Hadid for the 2012 Olympics, Rejina Pyo takes three Olympic athletes in swimsuits up onto the diving boards who jump into the turquoise water in perfect verticals. “The divers were training when I visited this place and I was totally amazed, traces the 38-year-old Korean. I immediately asked them to participate. “ Around the pelvis, athletic models stroll (on an improbable remix of La Compagnie Creole!) In light knits, trench coats, belted blouses, tops printed with personal photos, but also thongs (on small heels) or ball shirts in the hand, way out of the locker room.
In the parade format, Roland Mouret preferred a screening, given at the Soho Hotel. “This is not a fashion film but a short film, he warns before the credits. I wanted to do things differently, to give carte blanche. ” In this case, to the Franco-Nigerian actress and director Magaajyia Silberfeld, who, dressed in the collection – lovely pleated lemon dresses, taffeta evening dresses – is staged in Greece in a reinterpretation of the myth of Odysseus, from the point of view of mermaids.
Elsewhere, the cocktail, to make the presentation of a collection more effervescent, is popular. We sip champagne at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where Richard Malone draws, under Raphael’s paintings, draped pieces echoing the paintings, weighted with a (too) wise collaboration of Mulberry bags, a few frilly jackets and deconstructed suits. Richard Quinn goes further with a cocktail before AND after the revelation of his explosive pop jumpsuits with knots, floral dresses or quilted coats.
Paul & Joe play it more discreet. For her first London show, the French Sophie Méchaly goes back to childhood in the Georgian Dartmouth House. “When I was little, my father traveled a lot and brought me clothes from here, the little Harrods coat, the high socks. I was dressed as a girl from a good British family until I was 12, conceiving a repulsion from it. Today I embrace this period. “ She does it, to the tunes of Jane Birkin or France Gall, with a deluge of flowery dresses, rainbow hues like delicacies that color the tongue, crocheted vests and English embroidery.
Molly Goddard, too, is having fun with her little girlish wardrobe. Presented in a video – maternity leave obliges – her fun collection offers the smocked dresses, tracksuit bottoms and ballerinas of her tender youth, but made “10 to 20 times” taller.
“Scroll” on an intimate video site
Even designers who do without a physical event and show their work in pictures are no longer content with a banal ethereal clip, but seek to surprise their world. It is thus necessary to go, not on Instagram but on the exchange site of intimate videos OnlyFans, to discover the openwork dresses, latex shorts, briefs and tank tops of the JordanLuca duo, on boiling neo-Adam and Eve, snake crawling on their body.
JW Anderson favors a printed 2022 calendar bringing together 26 images captured without retouching by Juergen Teller. “For me, the pandemic was a moment of regeneration, assures Jonathan Anderson. It taught me that you have to show your designs the way you want, not as the fashion system dictates. “ In front of piled-up tires unfurl her hedonist dresses, translucent, voluminous and spangled, in micro-hook, open back, all in textures … “We forgot how much tactility matters. Nothing to superintellectualize here: I wanted to move towards an impertinence, a free expression of oneself. “
At the bustling and underground Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, the atmosphere is feverish in an alternative, gothic Islington club. The public is greeted on the sidewalk by fanatics in colorful outfits made from recovered materials, who distribute latex gloves or mad scientist glasses. Then, once inside, standing, their hearts shaken by the techno that the loudspeakers expel at full blast, the audience watches punk aristos in make-up, hair pricked with gel and wax hats with real candles lit on the floor tumbling down. head. Like stoned on synthetic drugs, they slip away in white frilled shirts or tartan jackets, before staying dancing late during a night out. after party.
“A classic parade proposes to sell clothes by turning those who wear them into objects”, asserts Steven Stokey-Daley. For the very first parade of his label, SS Daley, he takes the opposite view by offering a short play which the energetic actors of the National Youth Theater (of which he is a member) both wrote and performed the text. “It was a risk-taking. Clothes should not pass for costumes, but the theater should simply be their vehicle. “ He succeeds. Its actors put on checkered vests and corduroy shorts, inspired by the uniform of Eton’s students, rugby jerseys and knitwear, short pants and embroidered jackets, to discuss the misdeeds of toxic virility, internship confidences. , memories of bullying, romantic friendships. Unexpectedly, the theatrical escape brought a breath of fresh air. Of all, no salute was as warm as the shouts and applause reserved for the beginner.
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