Supriya Lele Sends Out London’s Most Sensual, Structural Collection
“There’s loads of fabric,” Supriya Lele smirked backstage at her Spring 2024 runway show in London, her first after an 18-month hiatus. “You don’t think there’s a lot of fabric, but there’s tons.”
The designer’s highly anticipated return to London Fashion Week brought the cool crowd to a parking garage at the Barbican Center. On the slick of a driveway, models walked confidently in clear sport shoes, low-slung trousers, savvily draped tanks, and hand-foiled metallic halters that dipped down in the back. Lele also introduced knitwear for the first time, shown as spidery knit separates, many of which culminated in a whoosh of fraying fringe. “I just wanted to play with texture and see how we could do knits,” she explained, “how we could make these intricate, embellished pieces in a knit.”
But the stars of the presentation—as always—are her draped separates, cut precisely to reveal a sliver of collarbone, hipbone, or inner thigh. It’s this ability to use labor-intensive techniques and a large volume of material to create an effortless-seeming fit—“It takes forever. It literally takes forever,” she admitted—that makes Lele’s work so outstanding. The ease and efficacy of Lele’s offering belies its construction.
In 2023, isn’t that what womanhood is still about: Taking something massively hard and making it seem effortless? That’s undoubtedly why Lele’s work resonates with performers like Dua Lipa and Caroline Polachek and with Victoria’s Secret, a company intent on selling a smarter kind of femininity. For the brand’s return to the runway this month, it partnered with young designers, including Lele, to create collections that fell somewhere between lingerie and ready-to-wear, shown on models like Hailey Bieber and Adwoa Aboah. The pieces Lele created—metallic slips and shimmery separates—drew inspiration from the elegant drape of saris, pieces that sit close to the body but don’t exploit it. “I just want to keep pushing what I do forward,” she said of working with Victoria's Secret. “My version of femininity doesn’t change per project.”
Her ability to tightrope-walk between hot and sensual is also what makes Lele’s designs so appealing to a modern audience of women who want to celebrate their bodies on their terms. The trend for baring it all, which Bazaar covered at the start of this year, is best done by female designers who know the complexities of what it means to feel hot today. Take a one-shouldered black dress worn by model Devyn Garcia on the runway: It snugs around the body in an embracing way, ruching and draping falling gracefully around curves—not cutting through them.
In her Spring 2024 collection, Lele’s popular trousers, with accentuated hipbone cut-outs, have been transformed into layered high-cut panties worn underneath transparent pants and skirts, a mostly covered-up glimmer of sexiness. Blouson-draped pants with slits up to the waist give the illusion of a skirt, whooshing around the knees as models walked by but pooling closed as they stood still backstage after the show.
Even a white tank, inspired by the undershirts her Indian uncles often wore beneath their clothing, radiates with confidence, and she’s gone as far as making one into a full ribbed bodysuit. “I wanted to pull something in from [the tanks] that felt sporty and modern,” she said, “but still quite elevated.”
Elevation came in the introduction of leather pieces as well, ingeniously sourced from scrap leather from Bentley automobiles. Mini bustiers and oversized leather jackets give the Supriya Lele woman a tough armor with a sensitive bent, the curved sleeves and cinched waist continue to radiate womanhood—not hide it. New bags and hardware pull from Hindu symbols to further empower the wearer, trishula-looking charms dangling from the end of flap bags in black, violet, and white.
Leaving the show through the Barbican Center, where students were rushing to the art library and toddlers were rolling over in the “Squish Space,” it was easy to imagine Lele’s models just stomping out into the world, not having to adjust their outfits once to merge into the hustling grit of London. That her clothes contain power and fantasy bundled into something so direct and real is her superpower as a designer—and why London was elated to see one of its stars return to London Fashion Week.
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