London Men’s to Move East in January
LONDON – London Fashion Week Men’s is taking its show on the road to Truman Brewery in East London in a bid to freshen things up and move closer to where the designers live and work.
The British Fashion Council will on Thursday release the provisional January schedule and announce that the threeday showcase, which runs from January 5–7, will no longer take place at the usual venue, 180 The Strand.
The BFC hub for the showcase will be Truman Brewery on the Saturday and the Sunday, while most of the shows will shift to venues in Mayfair on the Monday when the workweek starts, and traffic worsens.
“Showing in Holborn was great, but we thought that East London was more fitting and the whole point of London is regeneration and change. You expect to see something new and different in London, and we wanted to freshen things up a little,” said Dylan Jones, BFC men’s wear chair and editor of British GQ.
The men’s wear provisional schedule will be published Thursday, with Art School, which had previously shown as part of the Fashion East showcase, staging its first catwalk show, and new names including Delada, C2H4, Feng Chen Wang and Studio ALCH.
Art School will open the fall-winter 2019 showcase at 9 a.m. on Saturday at Truman Brewery while Iceberg will show later that day along with E. Tautz, Edward Crutchley and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy.
Sunday’s lineup includes Kent & Curwen, Chalayan, Christopher Raeburn, Phoebe English, Astrid Andersen and Cottweiler, while Monday will see the return of Craig Green, who showed his spring-summer 2019 collection at Pitti Uomo in Florence in June, A-Cold-Wall, Belstaff and Barbour International.
Asked about the future of London Fashion Week Men’s, which kicks off a long season that includes Pitti and Milan and Paris men’s weeks, Jones said industry discussions are always taking place around fashion week scheduling. He said that, for now, the designers want this London fashion showcase to continue taking place.
“We have to remember that we are here to service the designers. London has become a platform for emerging talent and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find this amount of talent in any other city internationally,” added Jones.
The BFC wanted the shows closer to the designers’ studios and workspaces.