Fashion on Wednesday
Plus Can this knit save John Lewis?
On the catwalks of London Fashion Week – where the clothes are dialled-up, the venues are awe-inspiring and the audience is a who’s who of the industry’s most influential protagonists – the woes of the British high street seem a world away. But one of LFW’S long-serving names is the next part of the plan in John Lewis’s quest to claw back profits.
Jackie Lee, who runs J.JS Lee and trained at Central Saint Martins, has been showing for almost eight years. Once part of a buzzed-about crowd of Newgen designers who helped London establish itself as a hotbed for exciting talent, she has now quietly found her groove creating understated minimalism and masterful pattern cutting. She is stocked at Dover Street Market and mostly sells to creative types who have an appreciation for pieces with a conceptual bent. So how, you may ask, is she going to help the nation’s favourite department store? With a nine-piece knitwear capsule that will be available from Saturday as part of the autumn/winter Modern Rarity collection.
The own-brand line, launched in 2016, is a neat example of how John Lewis’s fightback strategy is the antithesis of its competitors’. Last week, the partnership announced that profits for the first part of this year had dropped by 99per cent. It put this down to a lot of aggressive discounting on the part of other retailers, many of whom are in even worse financial straits, meaning that it, in turn, has had to cut prices in line with its “Never knowingly undersold” promise. Where others are going bargain basement with neverending promotions, initiatives like Modern Rarity offer an elevated sense of choice and uniqueness far from the high street norm. This is the third such collaboration; the first was with shirting specialists Palmer//harding, the second with Lee’s fellow South Korean, Eudon Choi. “We’re very selective about who we work Divine: from left J.JS Lee dress £150, J.JS Lee bouclé jacket, £130; J.JS Lee merino rib roll neck, £120, J.JS Lee merino rib knitted trousers, £120; J.JS Lee merino skinny rib jumper, £100, J.JS Lee knitted skirt, £120, Modern Rarity (johnlewis.com) with. It’s very much based on an aesthetic and a mind set. It would never be a name for a name’s sake, it’s got to feel right,” said Jo Bennett, head of womenswear buying as we browsed the collection, where silk camisoles sit alongside fluid tailoring and elegantly relaxed separates, forming a range for women who want grown-up, thoughtful, flattering pieces that attract compliments without being showy.
Of course, no matter how beautiful, a few pieces of knitwear aren’t going to rescue an entire store, but they are a crucial element in building the exclusivity John Lewis is aiming for; the goal is 50per cent of everything sold is own-brand or exclusive and that fashion will be the fastest area of growth in the next five years. So far, it’s edging in the right direction.
“I’d never heard of John Lewis before I moved here 12 years ago,” laughs Jackie. “I used to buy pots or knives but not clothes. Fashion people shopped at Selfridges or Liberty.”
But she has been impressed with the team’s ability to take her archive catwalk samples and turn them into something women of Britain want, using lightweight merino fabrics and altering cuts to suit “real” body types.
Where Jackie’s clients usually love long, trailing sleeves, they’ve been shortened so that the John Lewis lady can still chop veg or tap her phone. “We had all this time for fittings, but it only took an hour and a half, everything was perfect,” she says.
The camel co-ord is divine – one of those outfits that looks expensive and considered, but feels as cosy as PJS. The paperbag-waist pencil skirt or maxi dress, both soft grey with lacing details, would be gorgeous workwear options. Prices are reasonable, around £100 to £130.
Jackie’s mother, visiting from South Korea to coincide with the launch, has her eye on the light-as-a-cloud bouclé jacket. In short, it might just be the perfect blend of Lfw-level creativity and John Lewis know-how.