London Fashion Week has always had the rep of being the wayward younger sibling of fashion weeks. She’s hanging out at the back of the bus with unkempt hair and graffitied trainers. New York is the shiny sorority girl with its American household names. Milan is the slick operator with its powerhouse brands. And Paris is the grande dame, mother to historic French maisons. London has a handful of homegrown megabrands, but it’s mainly a place to birth new talent. Where passion projects start and where things come together with the help of friends, little resources and a whole lot of magic.
I basically am that messy wayward sibling, dressed in one too many layers, with a mussed-up pony and never quite reaching the mythical land of chic. London is the first fashion week I attended nearly 15 years ago when
I was a nervous bedroom blogger, standing in line at a Gareth Pugh show outside the Natural History Museum, waiting to be shouted at by PR legend Mandi Lennard (she ushered me in and I’m forever grateful). It’s where I cut my fashion teeth, seeing the genesis of designers from their graduate collections, and following their careers through to when they hit their 10-year anniversary.
Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to see many pivotal moments from designers. There’s the headline-grabbing stuff like when Paloma Faith sang the roof off at a Burberry show back in 2014. Or when Her Majesty the Queen popped up unexpected to present Richard Quinn with the inaugural QEII Award in 2018 (the only time my mum got vaguely excited about the abstract concept of London Fashion Week). There are the creative, emotive moments — when Christopher Kane showed his SS12 collection of crystals and flowers to a then unknown soundtrack of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’.
I stumbled out of a Fashion East show into oncoming traffic yelling, ‘THAT WAS SO GOOD!
But ultimately London means a lot. It’s popping into Molly Goddard’s off-schedule prom party where her mega tulle dresses that make up the literal bulk of my wardrobe debuted. It’s going backstage after a show and bear-hugging talented stylists, make-up and hair people, set designers and PRs, who have worked their arses off and not slept for weeks. It’s happy weeping at a Simone Rocha show when she writes ‘baby teeth and a lack of sleep’ in her press notes and you think about those dizzying post-natal hours of new motherhood. It’s letting the fat tears roll down my face, while being comforted by peers and colleagues in shared cars, because my personal life has fallen apart — but it’s okay, because we work in FASH-UN.
Sometimes I wish LFW didn’t look sheepish and was more bolshy. In New York, fashion week is blasted out in taxi cab screens and served up with CBS News reporters. Here’s it’s greeted with tooting irritation by cabbies, because I’ve stumbled out of a Fashion East show into oncoming traffic yelling, ‘THAT WAS SO GOOD!’
I can hear the eye roll. Urgh. Fashion! Who CARES! But we should flag-wave for the arts in general in London at this particular point in time, and cheer on a new generation of creatives coming through a pandemic and into the unknown. And yet they’ll still somehow end up making waves in their own idiosyncratic ways. Look to Harris Reed’s gender-fluid fashion. Or Nensi Dojaka’s body architectural lines. Or Ahluwalia’s storied textiles that map out her Nigerian-Indian roots. Just the fact that London’s designers come from a myriad of backgrounds gives us cause to celebrate. They represent the mad cultural patchwork that is this city. And you wouldn’t want it any other way.
