London’s designers may not be the one-legged-trousered provocateurs they once were, but they still have a little of the awkward squad about them. So they refused to play ball with the neat concept of Olympic-themed summer collections. Where sportswear figured as an influence, it was in a highly stylised guise: racer-back dresses at Marios Schwab and Peter Pilotto … Photograph: Trung Than/Photoshot
… and Aertex-effect shirts at JW Anderson. London designers will not be dictated to. Photograph: Catwalking.com
The princess bride is, frankly, over. A mischievous mind could, however, see a connection between the Cambridges’ married life in Anglesey and the fact that a new character – the Valiumed-out Stepford housewife – turned up on the catwalk this season. Jonathan Saunders, whose collection was once again among the very strongest, dressed his models in neat, modest, wifely shapes – a longish slim sheath dress, a crew-neck sweater with a knee-length skirt – but the fabrics and colours (chartreuse shantung silk, polka-dot pyjama silk) lent a tripped-out effect. Photograph: Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage
Shirts and trousers in matching prints (a look not much seen in the last half century) made a comeback on several catwalks, while ponytails and flicked-out black eyeliner were ubiquitous both on models and on the front row. Photograph: Catwalking.com
I was struck by the fact that in the space of a few hours on Monday, three of London’s hottest designers of the moment used the same analogy – of telling their customer a story – when we had these backstage conversations this week. Antonio Berardi, whose gorgeous tailoring had a magic combination of firepower and delicacy, said his new clothes were “a continuation of last season’s theme of armour and protection ... the positive to the last collection’s negative”. On his show notes, he included a quote from Milton - “Was I deceiv’d, or did a sable cloud/Turn forth her silver lining on the night?” Or, as he put it backstage: “Every cloud has a silver lining.” Photograph: Ian Gavan/Getty Images
“I think of each show like the next chapter in a book,” Erdem told me a few hours later after his show. “Last season’s muse was this angry artist’s wife, this time, it’s her stepdaughter. I was thinking about Bonjour Tristesse, about a girl dressing in her stepmother’s clothes. Clothes that look sheer don’t really reveal anything ... an innocent kind of sexual awakening.” Like Berardi, Erdem flipped from negative to positive this season: this was an airy, light remix of the Erdem signature lace dresses and dense flower prints. Autumn’s black and burgundy was replaced by Wedgwood blue and lemon yellow. Photograph: Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage
Backstage on Monday, Christopher Kane told a vignette about “the girl you hated at school, because she got all the boys”; her teenage bedroom, her sticker-covered schoolbooks. For Kane, each season is complete in its own right, sealed tight and stored for posterity, like a time capsule. Erdem has a strong brand – the lace, the dense flowers, the ballet-school deportment. Christopher Kane’s brand, on the other hand, is the creativity itself – the talent for telling stories through clothes. Photograph: Rune Hellestad/Corbis
