'Alexander McQueen is coming home the way football never could': This season’s ‘it’ item is the runway itself
London Fashion Week is finally back in vogue.
It felt, until recently, as if things might be over for London Fashion Week. Since Brexit, the consensus among industry titans has been to skip the city and fly straight to Milan in Italy, where audience figures have been growing year on year.
However, a changing of the guard at the British Fashion Council and a breath of Cool Britannia 2.0 means the wafer-thin programme is bulking out once more.
Scottish designer Christopher Kane has arrived at Mulberry to stage the brand’s first runway show in nine years and Alexander McQueen, which has shown in Paris since 2001, is coming home the way football never could.
In a year in which The King graced the front row at Tolu Coker’s London Fashion Week opening show, catwalk displays are going old school.
Perhaps the most significant addition to the line-up is Marks & Spencer, which saw what Calvin Klein was doing in the USA — resuming runway shows after a six-year hiatus — and decided it was time to put affordability on the catwalk. It’s no small feat: fashion shows are expensive, some reaching £10 million in production costs.
As audiences return to analogue (interest in film cameras and physical books is on the up), labels are finding it necessary to swap modernity for old-school tactics.
The 1990s, as so often, provide the blueprint: slip dresses and oversized blazers are among the top trends of the year. Appropriately, one of the cult films of the decade — the 1995 fashion documentary Unzipped, which takes viewers on a behind-the-scenes journey through designer Isaac Mizrahi’s Autumn/Winter 1994 collection — will return to American cinemas this month, sating growing demand among young fashionistas for whom the traditional runway format feels like more of a novelty.
Where a decade ago CHANEL might have launched a rocket during its show at Paris’s Grand Palais, today’s runway efforts are notably more pared back, placing the human at the heart of it all. ‘It transports me,’ singer-songwriter Charli XCX told Bella Freud on the designer’s Fashion Neurosis podcast, ‘to watch Naomi [Campbell] or Shalom [Harlow] stomping along to an epic song.’ The artist paid tribute to the catwalk in the video for SS26, a song from her new album Music, Fashion, Film, in which she struts down a runway before a fashion-week who’s who.
For all the industry’s flirtations with the cutting-edge, we seem more than ever in thrall to the traditions that first made it big.
