London Designers Keep Calm and Carry On Being Creative

LONDON — The narrative that London Fashion Week is stuttering feels overplayed at this point. With demand for fashion sharply down, isn’t practically everything in the sector stuttering at present? And as Sarah Mower’s chronicling of London Fashion Week since its 1984 inception illustrated, we’ve been here before.

Designers have always gone through booms and busts. So enough of the hand-wringing already. London’s designers, both established and emerging, are just getting on with it, often with the sharpened focus required to keep calm and carry on.

“This is a place where we can get away with theatricality — it’s important to show that London is here to stay and that we’re loud,” said Harris Reed, as he opened London Fashion Week at Tate Modern on Thursday night. The way he turned 200-year-old tablecloths and drapes into sculptural silhouettes keyed into how London’s creative class often makes do. The trick is to make it look seamless, which Reed mostly achieved.

Steven Stokey Daley has mastered elevated craft. At the Royal Academy, in front of backer Harry Styles, the designer made his official womenswear debut, showing that he is more than up to the task — and why his S.S. Daley label deserved this year’s Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design. His painted wood-beaded skirts, inspired by Constance Spry floral arrangements, could have looked kitsch, but they didn’t, sitting beautifully alongside pleated print dresses and boyish embroidered tailoring.

Michael Stewart, on the back of winning LVMH’s inaugural Savoir Faire Prize last week, was resolute that he won’t pivot to producing ready to wear. His Standing Ground label is standing firm on its made-to-order and private clients model. All the better for Stewart to hone into the fabric-wrapped beading that contours his sleek gowns. The foundations of a modern, English haute couture house perhaps?

At Fashion East, Olly Shinder’s kink-inflected uniforms stood out. His takes on Girl Scouts and 9-to-5-ers had a wicked sense of humour. You wished there was more of that on the London schedule.

At Harri, there was no shortage of kink: designer Harikrishnan Keezhathil Surendran Pillai has experimented with fabrics before but clearly it’s his directional latex that gets the crowds going. With his debut womenswear collection, there was rubber in abundance, moulded into fantastical proportions. London has a knack for catering to niches. Look at latex couturier Atsuko Kudo. Harri may well follow in their footsteps.

Johanna Parv’s first solo show made a case for fusing cycle gear and fashion. As the models unzipped jackets and removed holster handbags, you could already imagine her gear populating London’s cycle lanes.

16 Arlington’s Marco Capaldi came out of mourning (following the 2021 death of partner Federica ‘Kikka’ Cavenati) and turned the heat up with feathers, raffia and high-octane beach attire, and the results were convincing: you can see these clothes swaying seductively in Ibiza or Mykonos.

The decision to either stick to what you know or explore new territory is a perennial conundrum for designers. Does Chet Lo want to be forever known for his fun spiky durian knits? Maybe not, hence why he went all executive with a palette of steely grey and blue inspired by a computer scientist, but it came off looking stiff.

Meanwhile, KNWLS designers Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault paid homage to fashion greats (Alaia! Gaultier! Galliano!) and were on sure footing with their well-honed leather armour and lingerie-suspender pieces; less so with the stretch bias cut dresses in sepia colourways.

Emilia Wickstead tapped into the work of photographer Gisele Freund. Wickstead’s floral frocks — in particular, the elongated shift dresses — were accomplished. But the patrician shirts and ties tucked into skirts felt like Prada-lite.

Priya Ahluwalia’s retro-tinged printed jacquard and denim pieces have long been her strong suit, but her womenswear has never quite matched the verve of the Ahluwalia man. Marques Almeida has been around the London Fashion Week block and so their frayed denim pieces in Tudor-inflected shapes felt well-rehearsed, but the line-up of printed floral satins offered unfamiliar — and fruitful — territory.

Roksanda Ilinčić took us twenty storeys high for a circular view of London. Too bad the show was backlit from this writer’s perspective as one could only make out the voluminous and aerated silhouettes with a flash of mint or sherbet here or there. Ilinčić’s idiosyncratic design language could have done with a braver streak.

At J.W. Anderson, the way the models bounded out at a brisk pace in their stiff leather tutu skirts, satin ruched bubble minis and short and sharp enlarged knit dresses suggested the designer had no time to waste. These were focused and direct ideas — and all the better for it.

The last time Simone Rocha showed at the Old Bailey, she lifted us up with aviator straps and nylon parachute dresses. This time round, Rocha thought deeply about the idea of performance. After being in the spotlight following her successful haute couture outing for Jean Paul Gaultier, Rocha was keen to dig deeper into the performative side of our lives. Bouquets of roses splayed at the chest, giant tulle skirts as giant clutches and angular tutus were satirical gestures that felt like Rocha was pushing herself to go beyond ethereal aesthetics.

At first, it was hard to pick up on the transgressive nature of Erdem Moralıoğlu’s reference point: the author Radclyffe Hall, famous for her seminal queer text “The Well of Loneliness.” A collaboration with Savile Row’s Edward Sexton on a handful of suits was a clue (both Hall and her protagonist identified as female but styled themselves in menswear). But Moralıoğlu’s penchant for the feminine meant layered dropped-waisted pastel gowns with flailing straps and sheer metallic printed panels and floral nipped-in dresses, inspired by Hall’s lover Una Troubridge, dominated his British Museum show. You can’t fault Moralıoğlu’s rigorous level of research nor the beauty of his output, but perhaps it’s time to see the clothes in a more intimate setting.

In a dilapidated Shoreditch basement, Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena’s stomping tribe of full-skirted diehards felt very up close and personal. They were loaded with even more embellishment and sass than in the past. The bags accessorised with Hellmann’s mayonnaise was a funny and canny way to work in a sponsor. It takes confidence to serve such a cacophony of things, hence the swell of support for the duo.

Nensi Dojaka has taken two seasons off but came back with a bang — and a high profile Calvin Klein collaboration to boot. CK modal underwear meshed well with Dojaka’s flouncy lingerie dresses. For young designers, an enduring brand partnership is perhaps the only way to fuel the business long term.

In a short period of time, Aaron Esh has generated a significant amount of buzz. His show this season was well-attended, his sleek silhouetted boys and girls in noir and concrete bucking the London norm. Walk of shame sleaze hasn’t looked this seductive since 2010s messy nights out at The Dolphin.

Karoline Vitto, who dresses sizes 8 to 20, remains committed to plus-size casting as her contemporaries have largely abandoned body diversity. And with her clever metal constructions, she showed why dressing bodies of all shapes and sizes should be higher up the fashion agenda.

On the last day of London, Burberry skipped park life and took to the National Theatre. YBA Gary Hume’s tarpaulin installation provided a vibrant backdrop to an oddly perfunctory collection by designer Daniel Lee.  Trenchcoats in abundance (this time feathered and cropped) — check. Shades of grey weather — check. Riffs on the Burberry check — check. Backstage, Lee was effusive about taking Burberry’s codes beyond the show and into the real world and the clothes might well be commercial catnip, but where was the heart?

Clapton is a long way away from the bustle of the West End. But it was in E5, in designer Paolo Carzana’s back garden, where he made the case for why small can be beautiful. A Narcissus character emerged into the twilight gazing at his reflection in a pool. Only he didn’t fall into the water and was followed by a languid procession of Carzana’s natural-dyed storied textiles, crumpling close to the body. “I feel so out of place with this idea of coolness,” the designer said after the show. “I just care about the clothes and the creation of it.” It was the most emotional moment of the week and a reminder that fashion can be transcendent.