Forty shades of green on London catwalk:
Wexford designer Richard Malone kicked off London Fashion Week yesterday with a collection he described as ‘a joyous celebration of women’ featuring designs with new shapes and a palette inspired by micro-fibre cloths bought online.
LONDON Fashion Week cannot get enough of the two Richards – Malone and Quinn. The first is a former star student from Co Wexford who turned down a sixfigure salary with an haute couture design house to start his own label and is now part of the British Fashion Council’s (BFC) prestigious Newgen programme which gave Simone Rocha and JW Anderson their first catwalk exposure at London Fashion Week.
The second Richard is a London-Irish boy with parents from Meath and Donegal and an enviable fanbase that includes Amal Clooney, Anna Wintour and the ultimate fashion royalty, Queen Elizabeth.
Malone and Quinn, both in their late 20s and graduates of Central St Martins, hold the unique honour of opening and closing London Fashion Week.
The SS19 season launch at 8am yesterday was followed by Malone’s keenly awaited show in which the Ardcavan man ushered in new shapes, and a colour palette inspired by micro-fibre cloths, like the ones people bulk-buy online.
Couture-level design techniques were applied to biker trousers and “dresses to get laid in”. Bags came from the like-minded sustainable label Freitag, whose pieces are fashioned from recycled tarpaulin taken from the side of trucks.
The blaze of print was personal and the collection was borne directly out of Malone’s visual diary and hundreds of pictures on his phone.
Tuesday afternoon sees Quinn sharing his latest collection on the same BFC catwalk on the Strand.
Quinn’s AW18 collection of saturated prints and blousy florals currently sells at Brown Thomas Dublin.