This Giles Deacon Collaboration With Aspinal Is Quirky, Charming, and a Whole Lot of Fun
A very dapper Giles Deacon is standing in the middle of the Aspinal of London store on the city’s Regent Street, holding a very precious (and very tiny) trunk, not much bigger than his hand. It’s made of green satin, embellished with his sketch of a rather Surrealist-looking key and two interlocking feathers, and edged in metal, the flamboyance of the piece delightfully at odds with the imagined practicality of a packing trunk. In this instance, the scale and the look suggest a doll just took one last look at Toytown and announced, “I’m outta here,” and off she flounced, satiny valise in tow.
In reality, this tiny trunk purse - and a whole host of other charming and wittily decorated bags and leather goods - is part of Giles X Aspinal. It's a collaboration which sees Deacon, a designer who knows his way around a couture atelier, join forces with the British accessories house which was founded in 2000. Aspinal is known for its (yes) robust trunks, buckle-strapped satchels, and stately purses, the latter the kind of thing you’d expect to see in The Crown, with a young Princess Margaret dangling a bag from one hand and a cocktail from the other. The collection will be presented today during the London Spring 2019 shows, and will launch in mid-October, just in time for the holidays.
Several months back, Aspinal invited Deacon to work on something together; the company’s owner Iain Burton’s wife is a customer of his, and it was her who broached the idea. Deacon thought for two seconds about it and said yes. In part it’s because he relishes a project (this summer he published a terrific overview of his work with photographer Sølve Sundsbø and stylist Katie Grand, GilesSølveKatie) and partly because, as a designer who operates in the higher stratosphere of made to order, it appealed to him to work with the likes of Aspinal, whose relatively accessible prices bely the quality of their pieces.
For this collaboration, Deacon has taken his fashion sketches—languid figures who veer from a willowy Wallis Simpson type to someone who doesn’t look a million miles away from his girlfriend, the actress Gwendoline Christie—and flourished them over dinky chain strap purses, slim zipper-topped clutches and, perhaps best of all, a tan leather handbag which now boasts a black ink line drawing of a single vampy femme fatale slap bang in the middle of it. These images of his are, says Deacon, “all just new, fantastical kinds of things. Basically, I kind of thought, let’s do Aspinal through my eyes, and I wanted to get a whole load of cosmopolitan girls from everywhere and anywhere, who are attracted to the kind of . . . I think it’s an accessible English eccentricity, that’s what Aspinal is for me, and that’s what I can bring to it as well.”
Of course, the whole point of this collection is for it to be fun. An antidote to today’s world where Deacon not unreasonably points out, things could do with a bit of lightening up. “There’s nothing wrong with just having a nice gorgeous, pretty bag," he says. "We kind of forget about that. It doesn’t have to come with a manual.” Instead, the point is for these bags to have what he calls “lightness and kind of a charm.” When he was working on it, he was looking to the young women who make up the landscape of modern Britain; the girls who hail from Chelsea, or frequent Dalston, or head to the races at Goodwood. Yet for all that, the collection could just as easily be a geographical sweep of America: from wear-it-straight in Palm Beach, to love-the-irony of Los Angeles or indeed New York City, where many of Deacon’s clients are based. “Yeah, I could see the likes of Lizzie [Tisch] popping in and out of The Mark carrying any one of them,” he says, laughing.
