CAPITAL GAINS

London rocked for Fashion Week, with big guns Armani, Versace and Hilfiger storming the capital, and home-grown talent redefining our national identity. Britain, we salute you!

OUR BRITISH IDENTITY: that’s what designers were tackling at London Fashion Week. With all the noise of Brexit, is it any wonder that designers were obsessed with every aspect of Britishness? That brilliantly inventive Scot, Christopher Kane, revelled in British suburbia and all that goes on behind closed doors, from naughty maid outfits and crystal dominatrix chokers to earrings made from cotton-mop strands and shoes constructed with foam cleaning pads. For Erdem Moralioglu (who is Turkish/english and grew up in Canada), Britishness meant the Queen – specifically, HM in 1958 when she met Duke Ellington at a royal command performance in Leeds (Leeds!) – so he rigged his girls out in a dazzling collection of jewelled sweaters with slim Prince of Wales check skirts, grand dresses and brocade coats. Meanwhile, over at Burberry, Christopher Bailey, the Yorkshireman, evoked Britishness as the chav (though perhaps not intentionally). Having spent years protecting the brand from the likes of Danniella Westbrook, here he was boldly embracing her in all her Burberry-check baseball-hatted glory! Of course, it looked much much more lust-worthy this time around on model-of-the-moment Kaia Gerber. Those hand-knit Fair Isle sweaters, check flashing macs, anoraks, Argyle socks and penny loafers are all available to buy right now. And as for the rest of S/S ’18 (landing in-store in January), here’s the lowdown on the big trends and the best moments, all of it defining innate Britishness at its best – from our brilliant ‘British’ designers who, of course, come from all over the world…

SAY HELLO TO THE LLD

The nail in the coffin of millennial pink is perhaps even prettier: parma violet. If the London catwalks are anything to go by, this saccharine lilac shade is the only colour we’ll want to be wearing come spring. Specifically, it’s an LLD (little lilac dress) you’re going to need. Choose from fluttering lace (Preen by Thornton Bregazzi), fluid silk (Roland Mouret), printed with lurid ’70s wallpaper florals (Peter Pilotto), wispy and frou-frou (at Emporio Armani) or in butter-soft leather (Joseph – OK, technically a jacket but the oversized piece was worn sans trousers on the runway for the more daring among us). The rest is over to you.

SUNDAY BEST

We know, The Handmaid’s Tale was terrifying, but wasn’t it also rather chic (those bonnets! Those capes! Those pristine block colours!). Certainly, there was a puritanical feel to many of the London collections: from the Amish-style headgear at Preen by Thornton Bregazzi to Margaret Howell’s ankle socks and hair bows and the almost monastic, fluid white dress that opened Roksanda’s show. This being London, of course all that sweetness was messed up with a dose of subversion. Case in point: Molly Goddard’s good-girl white frock, worn by a smoking, drinking, stompy-booted Edie Campbell. Another designer with a knack for combining innocence and experience is Simone Rocha. As the models took their final walk in balloonhemmed, puffed-sleeve pieces, sunlight burst through the stained-glass windows of the Middle Temple venue. A sign of celestial approval? Possibly. Either way, the FROW was in love.

RAZZLE DAZZLE

Brexit Britain might be teetering on the precipice of a great unknown – but you wouldn’t know that to look at the London collections. Uncertainty and trepidation, if felt, are being countered by an exuberant, ritzy aesthetic defined by an abundance of glitz, glitter and all-round glamour. Michael Halpern, a designer whose ascent from one-to-watch to one-to-wear has been rapid, brought his Studio 54 aesthetic to the London Palladium (where else?) with thigh-grazing tunics and languid wide-leg pants extravagantly bedecked in beads and sequins. The party continued elsewhere with shimmering party dresses at Molly Goddard, a demands-the-spotlight boxy silver jacket at Versus Versace, and slinky minis and metallic tailoring at Topshop. Print maestro Mary Katrantzou brought her haute handiwork to sporty, bubble-hem dresses painstakingly embroidered with sequins and beads. Even J.W. Anderson, not a designer one would normally associate with sparkle and spangle, conjured up a fit-and-flare dress with leather and sequin stripes. D.I.S.C.O.

THE BIG GUNS

Once, London was the poor relation to New York, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks but, oh, how times have changed. This season, not one, not two, but THREE almighty global designers pitched up: Donatella Versace, Giorgio Armani and Tommy Hilfiger. Donatella’s Versus line was all about how slick it is to be street, aimed squarely at ‘post Millennial’ youth (bomber jacket and Versus-emblazoned bikini bottoms) – with the sound system to prove it. Emporio Armani riffed on sporty lightness in the Queen’s favourite sorbet shades (read all about Mr Armani on page 94). And as for Tommy, well, he turned Camden’s Roundhouse into a pulsating stadium and rammed it with Gigi, Bella, brother Anwar and a huge host of supermodels in logo’d sweats, plaid duvet coats, leather hot pants, over-the-knee football socks and bobble hats. Kudos to those big guns for wanting to yoke their brands to London’s blazing creativity and giving the capital the megabrand treatment.

CREATIVE BEACONS

At opposite ends of the designer spectrum and with more than 20 years separating them, these two designers are proof of London’s durable and endless creativity: in the left corner, Richard Quinn, Central Saint Martins’ most recent breakout star who showed an explosion of Liberty-print florals on gimpmasked models. In the right corner, Hussein Chalayan, who graduated from CSM in 1993 and unveiled his ode to ‘lost individuals in a digital world’ at Sadler’s Wells. This translated as some of the most refined and wearablewith-a-twist tailoring seen all week. And, naturally, his finale line-up of models, their heads encased in dramatic Swarovski crystalencrusted picture frames, was Instagram gold.

THE MODELS

Yes, Gigi and Bella were there (at Tommy) as was girl-of-the-moment Kaia Gerber (at Burberry), but there was another name who caught the FROW’S eye during the London shows: 17-year-old Elfie Reigate, who made her debut at Alexander Mcqueen last season and this time walked for Burberry, Topshop, Preen by Thornton Bregazzi and Simone Rocha. The first signing to Kate Moss’s model agency, ethereal Elfie is the daughter of model Rosemary Ferguson.

But the really inspired casting this season was that which embraced more diversity (hooray!). Fifty-one-year-old Cecilia Chancellor epitomised the contained confidence of the Roland Mouret woman at his show in the National Theatre; breakout star Faustine Steinmetz embraced all shapes, sizes, colours and ages on her debut catwalk, and model and disability campaigner Kelly Knox returned to the Teatum Jones runway. One of the best moments of the week happened under a railway arch in East London’s Brick Lane, the venue for the Marques’almeida show. There, design duo Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida, who have spoken openly about being bored by a generic template of beauty, asked actual friends of the brand to model their tough yet touching S/S ’18 collection. Is diversity the new normal? Not quite – but we’re getting somewhere.

NOUVEAU KNITWEAR

Enter your new status piece: the jumper. Hit knits we expect to see a lot more of: Joseph’s oversized, nubby sweater (creative director Louise Trotter knows good knitwear), Burberry’s patchwork knit skirt and trailingsleeved sweater, and Erdem’s princess-worthy, pearl-embellished capelet. And for the sartorial show-offs among us? Rising star Matty Bovan – who was on his final run as part of the Fashion East showcase – has made his name with his outlandish knits, and he didn’t disappoint. This season, he gave us shredded, hyper-hued pieces (most of which are handspun in his York studio) which captured all the energy of London’s emerging designer scene. We predict a bright future – literally.

ANTI-ANTI - PERFECTION PERFECTION

Fashion’s eschewing of perfection wasn’t just parlayed through the casting this season but could be seen in the clothes themselves, which often had a deliberately distressed, déshabillé charm. There were raw-edged trims at Roksanda, deconstructed tailoring at Joseph, frayed hems at Roland Mouret and unfifinished, unfinished, undone seams at J.W. Anderson, which gave the collections a tactility and warmth that felt unbuttoned and more relaxed. The young guns were at it too: Matty Bovan’s tattered knitwear had an almost post-apocalyptic feel, while couture-trained Faustine Steinmetz’s denim was shredded, distressed and dishevelled into works of art – proof that beauty can emerge out of imperfection.