Laura Craik on David Hockney, indie spirit and the art of name-dropping
Everybody’s winging it. The sooner you realise this, the more relaxed you can be about your own shoddy, hastily googled knowledge. Then again, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Which is possibly why, against a sea of alt-facts, London’s designers felt moved to nail their intellectual colours to the mast this season. Those who think clothes are just things you shrug on in the morning will probably not be arsed about the deep cultural subtexts running through the best collections like a silver threa It was a season of big questions — Who are we? What are we? — but the answers were optimistic. If New York wore its broken heart on its sleeve (and chest, via slogan T-shirts), London Fashion Week was more celebratory, of Britain and of Britishness. Both are in flux, but London’s designers weren’t in crisis mode.
However dark the shadows cast by Brexit, the catwalk was a place of light, populated by strong women. Preen referenced Tracey Emin and the suffragettes while Antonio Berardi referenced Lady Macbeth. Mulberry’s horse-blanket ponchos, meanwhile, were pure Queen Elizabeth II. The royals and the Bloomsbury Set are oft trotted out at London Fashion Week, so Christopher Kane’s collection was refreshing. His inspiration wasn’t the women at the top but those overlooked ones at the bottom, or, as his show notes put it, the girl who ‘blossoms on the factory floor’.
Factor in the tartan and wildflowers at Erdem, the Jacobean doublets at Simone Rocha, the smocking at Molly Goddard and the Prince of Wales checks that appeared almost everywhere, and you have a proudly British season. Let’s hope post-Brexit manufacturing costs don’t scupper our designers’ hopes. But as Victoria Beckham noted at the presentation of her Victoria Victoria Beckham line (the palette for which was ‘inspired by grey London skies’), we have to be optimistic. Easy to say when you’re a gazillionaire, but we do. And we will be. Right after someone changes the codes to the nuclear launch pad without telling Trump.
Vex-rated
Instagram is a brilliant tool for connecting young designers with potential customers, and thank God. When I first moved to London, small boutiques were integral to the city’s young creatives in every field, affording them exposure and a platform through which to sell. Where are they now? Increasingly, they’re crushed by crippling rents. Thanks to London’s £900m business-rates hike, more than 7,500 businesses will see a 40 per cent rise when new rates are enforced in April. Fine for Starbucks; fatal for the small family businesses and niche interest shops that make London the vibrant place it is. What can we do? Support them, and pray our leaders look upon them benignly before the city turns into one giant estate agent selling houses no one can afford.
Art of hearing
Everyone else is going to see ‘the Hockney’ so I figured I should see it, too, and was delighted to find two complimentary tickets on my seat at the Topshop show. I took my husband. Boy, was it crowded. You could barely see the fecund Yorkshire landscapes for other people’s heads. This suited me fine, partly because I have the attention span of a gnat but mainly because I’m one of those people who finds overhearing other people’s comments about the art more interesting than the art itself. The busier the exhibition, the more potentially comedic the remarks. ‘Wow. That really does look amazingly retro,’ said one woman to her companion, standing in front of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, painted in 1971. The passage of time will do that to a painting, yes. ‘Did I tell you about the time David Hockney phoned me?’ whispered a male voice. Here comes the name-dropper (there’s always one). Only this one was my husband. David Hockney phoned him? When? Why? Honestly — you think you know someone…
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