Day three of London Fashion Week’s AW23 collections kicked off with a giant phallus. No, no not a reference to any of the dickish behaviour show season can unfortunately evoke, but part of the installation that JW Anderson’s Roundhouse runway wrapped around.
This season, he collaborated with boundary-breaking choreographer and dancer Michael Clark. Looking at Clark’s legacy gave Anderson an opportunity to also look at his own. “Fifteen years of JW Anderson are condensed here and now, redone and re-seen,” he explained in the show notes. Not one to do things the obvious way, this didn’t mean a greatest hits re-edition. Rather, it felt like a dialogue, an exchange of ideas. Nowness rather than newness, he said. Side note: the Tesco dress and the Clark merch will excite the JDubz obsessives, but there were some really straightforwardly great, unassuming but no less exciting, clothes in the mix too. Shout out to the bootleg trousers with deliberately ragged hems.
Anderson is now a star designer with a front row to match. Naomi Campbell, Alexa Chung, Romeo Beckham and Mia Regan were there for it. Also in attendance was the art historian Katy Hessel, the woman behind the Great Women Artists podcast and Instagram. In her red trousers and white vest, she joked that her friends told her she looked like she was wearing an Arsenal kit. She didn’t. But they are top of the league, anyway — and so is JW Anderson, so it was fitting nonetheless.
There is a reflective air of introspection, all carried off with unmistakable London subversion and swagger, this season. Christopher Kane was nostalgic about the clothes his mum and sisters wore in the ‘80s. Testing the boundaries of taste is something he has always toyed with; AI-generated prints of rats, pigs and chicks, will make some go ‘ewww’ but that’s the desired provocation. IRL, they made the audience smile. Will you wear them? Could you? You will have a ball trying. Plus — niche trend alert — hay. At Kane, guests sat on bales of the stuff; Simone Rocha stuffed her dresses with it at the weekend.
Also on day three, there was an almighty battle of the dresses in the capital. In one corner, the Bafta red carpet; in the other, London’s catwalks. Our designers more than delivered, so much so that perhaps a few nominees were considering a last-minute outfit change. Look at London’s supreme storyteller, Erdem Moralioglu. This season he took Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Victorian-feminist-horror novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, about a woman’s descent into insanity as his jumping off point. This translated into deconstructed draped bustles, arsenic green metallised taffetas and jet beaded dresses that made a ripples of sound as they swished past. Each look could more than hold their own on any red carpet.
Also to wow in? Nensi Dojaka’s slinky, sexy gowns made for prowling and sassing in. Her skew-whiff lingerie pieces were still present, but it was also nice to see options for women who need to wear bras. Still, underwear or no underwear, wallflowers need not apply. And welcome back Julien Macdonald. You want lashings of camp-glam? He’s your man. The Julien x Gabriela collection — a collaboration with designer Gabriela Gonzalez — was inspired by ‘Millennial Mermaids’ and looked exactly as it sounds.
And if the Baftas can do fashion, fashion can also do thesping. Another of London’s narrative designers proved the point: Steven Stokey-Daley. The SS Daley show opened with Sir Ian McKellen giving a dramatic reading of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Coming of Arthur. This season Daley was inspired by the words of another poet. He’d been listening to The Ninth Wave by Kate Bush. Age gaps on the FROW were made starkly apparent; one fashion director was bemused to see some junior editors sneakily Shazam-ing.
Daley had Anna Wintour in attendance at his show, which says he’s already vaulted over ‘one to watch’ status. London’s reputation as an incubator of independent and emerging talent was further proved by Foday Dumbuya’s Labrum London, who took over Brixton Village with what our writers are calling the potential show of the season.
And gratitude at the end of the day, as north London’s O Pioneers took over Marylebone’s Jackalope pub. Alongside their charming floral dresses — something they’ve been doing way before anyone ever said ‘cottagecore’ — they served up pints and Tunnock’s teacakes. It was a much-appreciated sugar hit, in every sense.
