Join the Rixo revolution!
Hands up if you feel like London Fashion Week is strictly for the A-list, insiders and VIPS only? Fair enough – except the duo behind Rixo, Henrietta Rix and Orlagh Mccloskey, have made it their mission to change all that this weekend.
At exactly the same time as their LFW presentation on Saturday, a pop-up shop at 94 King’s Road will open its doors so that fans can shop the collection straight away. No waiting six months for the perfect dress and no seeing it on influencers without a cat in hell’s chance of ever being able to buy it. ‘We want our customers to feel really close to us,’ says Henrietta. ‘The message is very much, “You can be a part of it.”’
They’ll undoubtedly want a piece of this particular collection, which took the Swinging Sixties as its starting point. Expect psychedelic prints, hand-drawn by Orlagh and very much the brand’s signature, silhouettes that will remind older Rixo lovers of Mary Quant and Ossie Clark designs, and the brand’s first foray into suede and leather, in the form of a sweet monochrome skirt suit.
The presentation is going to be equally free-spirited. It’s a festival, partly in homage to Woodstock, with a ‘meadow’ made by Wow Grass from recycled fabrics, plus piercings, T-shirts, a tie-dye station, live music and an after-party that stretches to midnight. They’ve even got themselves a bus like Mary Quant – the designer famously covered a London bus in flowerpower florals, kitted out the inside with dressing tables to promote her beauty products and took it all over the world in the 1970s.
This Saturday’s all-seeing, all-dancing
proceedings mark a major moment for Rixo – and it’s been a serious trip. The brand launched in September 2015 as a two-manband, with Henrietta and Orlagh singlehandedly managing their pop-up, customer service enquiries, wholesale accounts and media strategy. Fast-forward four years and they have more than 120 global stockists, exponential sales and a staff that will soon number 30. When we sit down at their King’s Road pop-up, with both women resplendent in Rixo, you get the sense that they’ve hustled for every bit of their success. Henrietta, jokingly, says a mantra of sorts was, ‘If we’re going to give up our twenties, it can’t fail,’ and Orlagh chimes in with, ‘We’re winging it every day, figuring things out and learning from our mistakes.’
They might feel like they’re still ‘winging it’, but their work ethic (fearsome) and business instinct (natural, one suspects) has served them well so far. ‘The thing that helped us be brave was naivety,’ admits Orlagh. ‘I’m not a trained designer. My garment tech actually said to me, “There’s a purity to your work because you haven’t been told how to do anything.”’ She’s come a long way from hacking her clothes to bits as a child – ‘My mum was like, “If you cut one more thing, I’m going to kill you’’’ – and both women have acquired a bank of knowledge when it comes to production, thanks to their background in buying. ‘A lot of designers don’t know how to cost their garments so they get ripped off by factories and then price up,’ explains Orlagh.
They’re certainly not afraid to do things differently to their competitors – and are keen to keep the feel-good vibes going in the way they run Rixo. They promote the work of fellow female artists Laetitia Rouget and Astrid Wilson in the pop-up, and will be donating a portion of the sales from the see-now-buy-now collection to charities Smart Works and Cool Earth.
They say one of the biggest thrills is seeing Rixo in the real world, on ordinary women who have parted with their hardearned cash for something they love. What will those hardcore Rixo fans make of the new collection? A customer in the pop-up when I visited, who stumbled upon the preview rail and started flicking through before Henrietta and Orlagh could stop her, summed it up. ‘These are the best yet!’ Shop the exclusive collection from 5.30pm on 14 September in the pop-up and at rixo.co.uk