Last year, LA-based trend forecaster, digital strategist and contemporary techno-prophet Goth Shakira told me that fashion is the primary medium of feeling, emotion and impulsivity. Those words were with me as I navigated London Fashion Week, especially the impulsivity. LFW is often lazily positioned as the scrappy counterpart to Paris and Milan, but sometimes you have to admit that the evil clog fits. From some angles, “Britishness” was on full display. Daniel W. Fletcher’s debut as creative director of Chinese fashion label Mithridate was donnish and Oxbridgian, with flat, flappy brogues, jumpers around shoulders and navy layering. Elsewhere, brands looked to British visual art: Roksanda was inspired by Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural, massed work; Erdem partnered with Scottish painter Kaye Donachie, to create sensitive, watercolour-y dresses in appliqué and embroidery. But the most British thing about London Fashion Week was its undeniably faltering economy – it was four days long to Paris’ eight, and this year’s showing was especially thinned-out, with some of the scene’s heaviest hitters (Chopova Lowena, Jonathan Anderson, and Molly Goddard among others) not presenting collections at all.
This created a feeling that attention was elsewhere, giving the week a seedy magnetism. At Fashion East, one of Nuba’s models came out with his hands in a pocket at the front of his trousers, looking like someone you would strive to avoid at the bus stop. Paolo Carzana’s ragged, beautiful pieces were dyed in vats of turmeric grubbed up out of the ground; Masha Popova displayed a grubby tracksuit gilet that looked as if someone had been wearing it to forage through ancient and reeking bins; Charlie Constantinou sent his models out in ravey fleece and nylon, the colours of a sunset on a dying planet (but also a bit Weekday) - futuristic from the vantage point of the 1990s, the kind of paranoid dystopianism of The Matrix and Blade Runner. The aesthetics of post-apocalypse, but borrowed from an older generation. At LUEDER, however, this rave-y energy was literal, with models dancing in pockets of spotlights in an otherwise dark room. As an insane breakbeat edit played of the theme song from Pinky and the Brain, the cartoon about two genetically-enhanced lab mice that ran between 1995 and 1998, I experienced genuine thrill. “We’ve reached a fever-pitch vibration of so much nostalgia versus so much nihilism versus the looming and impossible future of genocide, climate change, AI singularity and more,” said Goth Shakira, all of which signals “a precursor to a total breakdown in how we live and act creatively and artistically.”
Brecht wrote, “Let nothing be called natural in an age of bloody confusion, ordered disorder, planned caprice, and dehumanised humanity – lest all things be held unalterable!” For her presentation, Kazna Asker recreated a kind of bazaar in the 180 Strand NewGen space that was inspired by the shops her extended family owned in Yemen and the corner shops her immediate family ran in Sheffield, where Asker grew up. Projected huge onto the walls were COMMUNITY and FAMILY, words also picked out on T-shirts and tote bags; people were served tea, dates, and colas with the word “Palestine” written across them. The show puts clothing’s connective insistence at the forefront, its proposition that all things are alterable, most of all the things we wear and how we wear them. By looking closely at that, everything else becomes constructed, and deconstructable. Let nothing be called natural.
Nell Whittaker
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This year, the BA Fashion Communication and Promotion course at Central Saint Martins (affectionately known as “FCP”) celebrates 50 years of being the rebel heart of the fashion industry. In this video, former FCP leader Lee Widdows speaks to current leader Dal Chodha and TANK’s own Masoud Golsorkhi on the legacy of the course.
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“The author added a final poetic flourish: if she had any decency, she would turn herself out “on the Beverley Westwood pasture with the rest of the cows”. What do the poison-pen letters of Shiptonthorpe reveal about the dark side of rural community? Francisco Garcia investigates.
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Meet cute: Xiaopeng Yuan captures close encounters in Shanghai.
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Inspired by dreams of open-air dance floor moments, this week's TANK Mix by Noodle features deep and dubby minimal intertwined with moments of cascading, glittery euphoria.
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