COCOON sleeves and big rounded shoulders - within womenswear, menswear and knitwear - proved to be the trend among the new wave of designers graduating from the Royal College of Art last night, where fashion industry press were given an insight into the minds of the fashion names of the future. But this being an MA course meant that ideas and execution were more slick and commercially aware than those we had seen earlier in the week at the BA Central Saint Martins graduate show where at BA level they - to a degree - remain untamed and raw. That's no bad thing, it's simply part of the melting pot of creativity that is the London fashion scene.
And it didn't mean that there wasn't plenty to see: polished sherbet shade knits in sleek and sculpted silhouettes from Xiao Li; black blingy sequin numbers of square panel constructions from Harriet De Roeper; all-grey and corsage-adorned suiting from Lorna Bilsborrow; big-but-casual fuzzy knits from Camilla Woodman; contemporary safari chic for gentlemen from Ivan Nunes; and blue and black tight glossy dresses from Swarovski-Elements-backed Ana Ogun-Sanya. It was, overall, an especially good night for menswear - Liam Hodges among one of the night's names to know.
"Morris dancing was the start of it," said the Medway-born designer who had previously studied his BA at Westminster. "It's everything I like: punk, Nineties, hip-hop. Kind of the idea of getting ready for a night out," he described of his multi-layered collection of streetwear-historians-meets-arctic-burglars-meets-Shakespeare and a fisherman all at once, a look which surprisingly worked.
"I was going to become a banker in the city but I went to art college and enjoyed it. I never planned anything like this," confessed Hodges post-show. "I think I'm a bit selfish and design for me," he added, which is also no bad thing at all.
This weekend sees the start of Graduate Fashion Week, the next round of student shows before London College of Fashion wraps things up in July.
No comments:
Post a Comment