TWO BRITISH designers with growing international reputations sent out strong winter collections yesterday at London Fashion Week, further enhancing the city’s reputation for promising rising stars.
Peter Pilotto’s show, backed by no fewer than eight commercial sponsors, was staged in the old Billingsgate Fish Market and Christopher Kane’s in Sheldon Square, a new development in Paddington.
Celebrities including Daphne Guinness and Alexa Chung and a host of prominent US and European press and buyers turned up for Kane’s show which was buzzing with frenzied photographers and camera teams.
Glasgow-born Kane is this year’s winner of the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fund award of £200,000, enabling him develop his business into a global fashion brand.
Only a really talented designer could take the multicoloured crochet granny blankets, so popular in the 1970s, dull down the shades and abstract them into hardcore high fashion. That’s what he did with the opening numbers, the sexy little crochet skirts and dresses in blue, black and grey, worn with embossed leather jackets or lean black coats.
A sequence of black dresses artfully edged with wavy trims of colour tinted vinyl showed his use of innovative fabric combinations and the finale of sequined separates shadow dyed in pale colours sparkled with high voltage glamour. A great collection.
Peter Pilotto and partner Christopher De Vos combine original prints with sculptural shapes and their collection offered some handsome winter coats, many long and sleeveless (another noticeable trend) or with curved cutaway fronts.
Silk chain-print checks made for some appealing tunics and midi-length dresses and the general effect of light layering – tunics over skirts over narrow trousers in a melange of patterns – looked subtle and modern.
Guests arriving for the Burberry Prorsum show in Kensington Gardens created huge traffic jams; the show was streamed live at 4pm and was estimated to be seen in almost 200 countries.
Irish viewers will have noted not only the fruity new colours for winter – tomato, pistachio and orange and the checks – but also the riffs on Aran knits like a white Aran trench and cabled insets on a white tinsel tweed coat.
Fur was used as shoulder decoration, while occasionally garish but far more desirable were the protective PVC capes paraded over their outfits by the models weathering the blizzard of snowflakes that closed the show.