Charles Jeffrey Loverboy United Kingdom
Like every great liberal-minded capital city – and arguably more than any other – London has a long and noble history of offering sanctuary to those who find themselves excluded elsewhere. Charles Jeffrey, who once said he was first assaulted on the street of his hometown in Scotland for being different at the age of 16, is the latest in a glorious line of aesthetically decadent and proudly queer creative fashion forces to have emerged from the capital’s club scene.
During his studies at Central Saint Martins, during which interned at Christian Dior’s couture atelier, Jeffrey was a regular at Ponystep and Boombox. He then founded his own night, LOVERBOY, dedicated to celebrating what he called “the visuals of going out”. Those visuals – clothes so riotously abnormal they demand to be both looked at and worn as proud declarations of difference – seemed almost fully-formed by his catwalk debut as part of the MAN showcase in London’s Autumn 2016 show season.
Yet every season since, Jeffrey’s language of cleverly deformed tailoring, post-punk disarray and undress as a form of overdressedness has developed in a fresh and provocative way. I was lucky enough to be seated alongside Jeffrey when he was declared winner of the Emerging Talent menswear category at the British Fashion Awards: dressed in outrageous makeup cats-eye contact lenses, he was close to tears as he accepted the prize from his idol, John Galliano. He also owes some of his language to another idol, Vivienne Westwood, and freely acknowledges that.
If there is a suspicion that Jeffrey’s shows are as much about the happening – the highly-entertaining dancers and the extreme performance – as they are about the clothes, then that suspicion is totally justified. His most recent show for instance, S/S 19, featured twitching dancers performing a writhing display of ‘pain and protest’ as as both celebration and statement of solidarity with the trans community. Jeffrey’s clothes and shows are emblematic of a credo that dressing how you want, dancing how you want, and loving who you want are all non-negotiables in being who you really are.