London Fashion Week brings retro romance, radical performance art, and sexy hips to day four
With major shows, including Roksanda, Emilia Wickstead, and Osman, on today’s line-up, Olivia Petter rounds up the highlights from day four of LFW
It’s the penultimate day of London Fashion Week, aka the moment when the weariness has taken hold. By now, the fashion pack has run out of small talk, acquired a permanent headache from all the caffeine they’ve consumed, and compiled a sizeable floordrobe at the mess-strewn place they call home. Or maybe that’s just us.
The end is nigh, but as we near the finish line, some of the best shows await, with big hitters including Roksanda, Simone Rocha, and Emilia Wickstead on todays’ line-up. Proceedings began, however, with newcomer Supriya Lele, the British-Indian designer who was a finalist of the LVMH Prize in 2020. The Royal College of Art graduate was selected to showcase her work at LFW in 2016 as part of Fashion East and has gone from strength to strength ever since.
Famed for her early Noughties-influenced aesthetic, which draws on low-slung waistbands and clingy sheer fabrics, Lele is quickly becoming a go-to brand for nostalgia-obsessed shoppers, which, let’s face it, is most of us. Her clothes have been worn by everyone from Dua Lipa to Rihanna, and we suspect this is just the beginning of the 34-year-old’s A-list clientele.
The collections are always unavoidably sexy, with Lele taking her cues from minimalism heroes like Helmut Lang and Raf Simons, while incorporating her own, highly feminine and flattering aesthetic. This season was no different, with Lele showcasing her small spring/summer 2022 collection at the British Fashion Council’s TikTok space just off of London’s busy Oxford Street. Taking place at 9am, the show marked an unusually early start for the fashion crowd – many of whom were out on the town last night at the launch of Perfect Magazine – who tightly clung on to their takeaway coffees as models strutted down the runway in Lele’s striking designs.
The usual Lele tropes were there – keyhole dresses, ruched bodysuits, and elegant draping – but they were revamped in new colourways (think turquoise and burnt orange), and fabrics, with leather making a surprisingly high number of appearances for a spring/summer collection. There were see-through beaded tops, too, tapping into the increasingly prominent “naked dress” trend we’ve seen taking hold at the Met Gala and yesterday at Rejina Pyo. Worn over bandeaus and bikini tops, Lele gave the trend a new, bohemian twist.
Elsewhere, highlights included a vibrant green organza tie-up skirt, which was paired with a feathered halter-neck top, an orange leather suit that featured Lele’s signature wrap-around ties, and sheer three-quarter-length trousers that flared ever so slightly on the calf.
“Artisanal meets the everyday, as delicate cerulean embroidery sourced in India – the country where Lele’s parents were born – complements jewel tone green silk chiffon, a colour inspired by sportswear in the designer’s own wardrobe,” explain the show notes. They go on to describe the collection as a “symbol of self-assured strength” and “an evolution designed to elevate and celebrate”. Indeed it was.
Next, it was off to the Serpentine Gallery for Roksanda. The Serbian fashion designer is renowned for her joyful, colourful clothing that blends exquisite tailoring with sophisticated silhouettes. Her fanbase spans sizes and age ranges – a credit to the versatility of her designs – with celebrity clientele including Zawe Ashton, Cate Blanchett, Vanessa Redgrave, and her daughter, the actor Joely Richardson.
For spring/summer 2022, Roksanda staged her show in the concrete Pavillion, a suitably theatrical setting for the phenomenal piece of immersive performance art that was to follow. Dancers climbed over the Pavillion’s various plinths, swooping into the centre, all paintbox-bright robes and pained expressions. There were grunts, moans, and occasionally, actual huffs and puffs, all of it unfolding inches away from bemused fashion editors’ faces.
Choreographed by Holly Blakey as part of a continued collaboration with the brand that began in 2019, the routine was inspired by the simple compulsion of movement, a freedom that has been hindered by the pandemic. “When freedom becomes contained the need for movement rises to heights of new imagining,” states the show notes. “The focus on ‘motion’ builds an atmosphere of change and through this, the narratives of women and placement in society have been explored as the basis of the Roksanda Spring/Summer 2022 collection.”
As always with Roksanda’s collections, there was also a strong focus on femininity and female empowerment, with the words “WOMAN” splashed across silk garments in homage to evocative female creatives like Joan Didion and Pina Bausch. While the clothes themselves could have seemed secondary compared to the performance, they proved anything but.
The collection was created in line with the aforementioned themes of liberation, motion and womanhood, with scribbles of colour splashed across dresses and fringes falling off of knitwear to resemble chaos, creativity and freedom. Elsewhere, tunics, trench coats and capes conveyed a utilitarian mood. Colours were eye-popping, and included acid pinks, neon greens and intoxicating crimsons.
Finally, it was off to Notting Hill to pay a visit to Emilia Wickstead. Known for her flattering fits and vivid colour palettes, the New Zealand-born designer is a go-to for the likes of the Duchess of Cambridge, Gwyneth Paltrow and Saoirse Ronan. This season, Wickstead’s deeply romantic, floral-heavy collection was inspired by the French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad, which the show notes describe as “genre-defining” and “fashion-forward”.
“I became obsessed with the film in lockdown,” explains Wickstead. “It has such brilliant cinematography and is quite surreal. That led me onto looking at other love stories from the 1960s and the film icons that starred in them.” This fascination with cinema was translated into the film that accompanies Wickstead’s collection. Shot at the Badminton Estate in Gloucestershire, the film follows models gliding through vast herbacious grounds, which look almose maze-like, adding a hypnotic element to the designs themselves.
The themes of juxtaposition that are explored in Last Year at Marienbad were integral to Wickstead’s vision for spring/summer 2022, which manifested in a series of breathtaking and masterfully crafted garments that you practically want to tear (gently) off the rails on wriggle right into.
Hand-painted blue and blood orange roses were delicately placed on white A-line gowns, while waists were accentuated in two-pieces with low-slung pencil skirts. Classic swimsuit shapes were reimagined in spray-on effect tops, while playfulness came by way of a fish-printed dress, inspired by the famous fish tank scene in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet.
The highlight for us, though, was a bright yolk yellow dress that came with a cinched-in waist which fell into gentle pleats and a square neckline fitted with thick supportive straps. It is the epitome of elegance and, just like the rest of Wickstead’s spring/summer 2022 collection, we want to wear it immediately.
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