THE CLIMATE in Britain may be one of grin and bear it at the moment, but the mood at yesterday’s shows in London was anything but sombre, with a host of winter collections that were colourful, feminine and desirable.
A new generation of younger designers are putting older stalwarts in the shade and, in a year that marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, fashion is all about survival of the fittest.
Luella Bartley, a former style journalist who set up her own label eight years ago, has already built up a £9 million (€10.25 million) business. Her collection was a stylish new take on naval motifs with wet-look red macs and brass-buttoned and zippered knit dresses – a winning line-up for the modern metropolitan. There were cheeky colour clashes such as a green moiré pinafore worn with a skyblue shirt and pink pigtails, while red pompom stilettos gave extra glamour to a grey skirt suit trimmed with black tulle ripples.
Reviving a 1970s label was not going to be an easy task for Avsh Alom Gur, creative director of Ossie Clarke, whose last collection came in for a lot of criticism. This time he captured more of the spirit of the decade with lovely airy abstract prints and tieback dresses that were girlish and often romantic. But some items jarred, such as a batwing jacket and ruffled chiffon dresses the colour of Lucozade. Close-fitting plain or printed satin shirts and suits were more contoured and controlled.
For a season marked by references to the 1980s, particularly the accentuated shoulderline, the collection from Canadian-born Erdem Moralioglu, who formerly worked with Diane von Furstenberg, showed how beautiful and pretty rather than hard and tough the wider shoulder could be.
Silhouettes were curvy and feminine, with stiff full skirts, narrow waists and artful appliqué on computerised floral prints that wound sexily around the derriere. One dreamy satin dress of midnight blue was shot with black crystal embroidery and had cap sleeves of delicate lace.
With models’ hair scraped up severely, the show as a whole had a formal elegance rarely seen on the London catwalk.
With established players such as Betty Jackson showing bulky mohair coats (albeit in lovely colours) and Nicole Farhi 1940s trenchcoats that looked like tinfoil, Jasper Conran surprised his beau-monde guests in a deconsecrated church with a corsetry peep show of black-lace lingerie counterbalanced with hourglass dresses and suits.
It was an exquisitely rendered collection, but where would one be going wearing nothing but a tooled leather swimsuit, biker jacket and killer heels?