LONDON.- There is a scene in the second episode of the compulsively watchable and entirely self-hagiographic new fashion docuseries, “In Vogue: The ’90s,” in which Anna Wintour describes London as the “place you went to look for the best talent.”
Although — as the current 40th-birthday-of-fashion-week celebrations in London reflect — the collections were officially organized in 1984, it was the shows of the late ’90s and early 2000s that really put the local scene on the international map. They were fashion week’s equivalent of raging adolescence: a period of great chaos, intensity and transformation.
That was when Lee Alexander McQueen was upending and dazzling expectations showing one collection that involved ink spreading through an acrylic runway and models doused in rain, so their clothes stuck to their bodies and mascara ran down their faces, and another set around a glass-box pseudo-sanatorium, with live moths being released during the finale.
When Hussein Chalayan addressed issues of immigration and women’s rights with shows that involved tables and chair slipcovers turning into dresses, and an array of chadors that became progressively shorter until they revealed a model naked, except for her face. When Julien Macdonald closed a show with Scary Spice (now Mel B), and the Jagger girls (Jade and Elizabeth) walked the runways along with aristo-models such as Stella Tennant and Honor Fraser. When Britpop and the YBAs (young British artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin) and fashion were so intertwined that in 1997, Vanity Fair unveiled its “Cool Britannia” cover, with Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher snuggled up under a Union Jack blanket.
This was pre-digital fashion and pre-social media. If people wanted to see what was happening, they had to show up in person, rush from old warehouse to decrepit bus depot, and stand around in giant crowds outside long past the official entry time before pushing their way in and waiting some more.
Fire regulations never seemed to be a concern, nor was scheduling. Dirt and lateness and discomfort were just part of the deal, because what was happening had nothing to do with cash registers, and everything to do with creativity. And that was the whole deeply annoying, exhausting, exhilarating, worth-it-all point. As Edward Enninful, fashion director of i-D magazine in the 1990s (and later editor of British Vogue), says in the Vogue series: “The word commercial was the dirtiest word.”
Growing Up
I was thinking about all of this over the weekend, as I Tubed around London from show venue to show venue.
Thinking about it at the Royal Geographical Society, where Emilia Wickstead showed her candy-color trousers with matching extra-long neckties and then layered one blurred floral over another on tea dresses to create her own shifting reality. In the courtyard of the British Museum, where Erdem held his ode to the LGBTQ+ writer Radclyffe Hall and her 1928 book “The Well of Loneliness,” offering a lyrical mix of suiting made with Sexton of Savile Row (the book’s first page reproduced in canvas on a sleeve), and fragile 1920s dresses, shoulder bows fluttering out behind like personal flags.
And in the Central Criminal Court of the Old Bailey where Simone Rocha mixed tutus (even tutu-festooned handbags), dancer dishabille and the twisted nudes of painter Genieve Figgis in a fantastic show about the underbelly and perversity of the creative arts.
London Fashion Week is altogether more grown-up and polished than it used to be. Shows start relatively on time, and although there are still some held in the wilds of the East End, many collections have wormed their way into the symbolic hearts of the city. It is no accident that almost every season includes a cocktail party at 10 Downing St. (this time Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, talked about the value of creativity and poked fun at his own dress sense).
When I asked Caroline Rush, CEO of the British Fashion Council, why the organization had decided to celebrate LFW at 40 instead of 50, generally the bigger milestone, she said, essentially, that 40 marks a new life stage. True: That’s when you hit middle age. Not actuarially, but psychologically.
It’s when brands swap cheap vodka for Champagne, and potato chips for caviar on toast. It’s also when mortality becomes part of the calculation; when the sense of what is possible becomes more realistic — or limited. When giant dreams are often traded for comfort and what is achievable. That might be good for business, but it doesn’t generally lead to paradigm-shifting fashion.
London in the late 1990s, as Enninful said in the series, was full of designers who “took the fashion system and turned it upside down.” Now, as accomplished as the talent is, the ambitions seem more constrained; the clothes, less extreme; the risks of getting big (bankruptcy, stress, addiction, public cancellation, retail partners that go under and don’t pay) more scary.
Jonathan Anderson, the only designer showing both an eponymous brand in London and running a big European heritage house, Loewe, often seems to treat his JW Anderson line like a petri dish for weirdness. But this time around the trompe l’oeil fashion play — silk minis with buttons and pockets silk-screened on top, tank frocks made with jutting leather “tutus” and supersize knit-potholder shifts — was more minorly thought-provoking than majorly dress-changing.
The Burberry-ization of Everything
Even many of the buzziest next-gen labels, like Standing Ground, where designer Michael Stewart’s made-to-order dresses drape and sculpt the body; S.S.Daley, who branched into womenswear this season with a collage of tailoring, digitized tapestry prints; and Nensi Dojaka, whose body-first lingerie styles got an added boost from a Calvin Klein collaboration, seem less sold on disruption than on the idea that small and steady wins the race.
They are probably more than aware that of the wardrobe-shaking brands that came out of London in the late ’90s, the biggest one left in the city is one of the least radical. It was in 1997, after all, that a U.S. executive named Rose Marie Bravo decided that Burberry, until then Britain’s most famous manufacturer of trench coats, should take a cue from the big French heritage brands, hire a real designer and hold a runway show. That because of its size and revenue, it could be the power center of the industry.
And, indeed, so it became. In some ways, the story of London fashion since the turn of the century has been the story of its Burberry-ization. Now the gravitational center of the London collections, Burberry is not just the show with the most celebrities (Barry Keoghan, Skepta, Olivia Colman and Normani), but the biggest presence. Even when its stock price and sales are so challenged that the company has fallen out of the FTSE 100 for the first time in 15 years, a new CEO has recently arrived, and the designer, Daniel Lee, seems to be (understandably) playing it safe as a result.
With, duh, outerwear. Trenchcoats given a high-neck, multi-buckle mien; trench coats deconstructed into backless dresses; parkas with organza feathers at the hood layered over swingy halter-neck sequined dresses; shrunken leather jackets over floor-sweeping pleated skirts. All of it very well done and easy to wear, but not very inspired. Four seasons in, Lee is still trying to figure out what defines his Burberry; in the meantime, he’s going through the motions. The problem is, no one really needs more motions.
The show was held in the National Theater, against a backdrop of cutout faded jade tarpaulins by the artist Gary Hume, a core YBA member, inspired by a work he had first shown in 1990. Kensit, the star of the 1997 Vanity Fair cover, was in the audience, as was her son with Gallagher, Lennon. Later that evening, Burberry, along with the British Fashion Council, sponsored a 40th-anniversary bash to end the collections, held on a rooftop in the Kensington district.
It mostly served to remind everyone of what was, rather than change their notions of what could be.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
