Louise Gray: A Totemic Comeback for a Scottish Original
Louise Gray: A Totemic Comeback For a Scottish Original
In the family tree of brilliant British fashion originals, the female line is strong. Louise Gray is on a branch which descends from Vivienne Westwood and the women of punk—the musician, now-artist Linder Sterling, for one—passing on the indie flame. It’s that fire in the belly that says: “question everything”—which is one of Gray’s prolific handwritten slogans that she now posts on Instagram, prints on T-shirts, exhibits in galleries, and uses to ignite independent thinking in her students (she teaches part-time at her alma mater, Central Saint Martins). In this age of roiling fake news, what could be a better stop-and-think warning?
Early on Saturday morning, it was a testament to Louise Gray’s community standing that a crowd crossing fashion, art, and every intersection of queer creative individualism in London gathered on the doorstep of the East End Stuart Shave gallery to see her first fashion happening in the five years since she left the London catwalk. Sterling was there taking pictures, her son providing the live music. There were three flagpoles in the room, decorated with random pieces of paper. One of Gray’s off-the-top-of-her-head sayings was Sharpie-scrawled thus: “Could be described as extreme individualism.”
Correct diagnosis, that. Gray’s models weren’t models, but people she has found along the way—friends, dancers, a nurse, students, and people met during Gay Pride and in the supermarket. A bricolage of kinds, just like the clothes she showed—tufted, checked tweed tailoring (which can be ordered made-to-measure at the Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons); some of her puff-shouldered, deconstructed Madonna meets Princess Di party dresses; and athletic bra tops and bike shorts, which were put through their paces by dancers.
Gray first started showing in London when the globalization of the fashion industry was hitting and with it the pressure—always unrealistic—on young designers to become mass sellers to retailers all over the world. Result, as Gray put it: “I wanted to take a break, to find my confidence to say the things I want to say, the way I want to say them.” She’s been an influence on the new generation of designers like Matty Bovan and Rottingdean Bazaar, who follow in her footsteps but are now resolutely clear-minded about doing things at their own pace, on a small-scale, and making stuff with their own hands.
After Gray’s show, there were the inevitable questions about why she would want to put herself out there in the fashion arena again. Answer: Times have changed, and she’s found a way to sell directly online. As the world has turned, the practice of working in small drops of limited products, direct-to-consumer, is something the biggest luxury brands have adopted as the way forward. That’s exactly how Gray and her extended community of young designers are also operating, just by following their own instincts. “The mission isn’t to sell numbers; my work is to have my own creative space to show and to design with purpose and fantasy,” she said. “And also” she added, “I just love doing it.”
