Beneath the glitter and sequins and extra-long false eyelashes, the bald truth at London fashion week is of an industry overshadowed by the luxury might of Europe and the US. Many designers have closed their doors, or cannot afford to splash out on a show. At just four days long, London fashion week has shrunk to half the duration of the Paris shows.
Cash is in short supply, but ambition and creativity are not. At SS Daley, the Harry Styles-backed brand whose trench coats are now sold at John Lewis, the show opened with the sound of Big Ben, included “Stay Faithfull to Marianne” sweaters in tribute to the late British style icon, and closed with a general clamour for selfies with front row guest of honour, the Amandaland actor Lucy Punch. Actor Debi Mazar took the stage for jewellery brand Completedworks, playing a television shopping channel hostess on the verge of a nervous breakdown, hawking the “mermaid realness” of pearl earrings while sipping a martini. At the Tate Modern, Florence Pugh opened Harris Reed’s show with a monologue in praise of “the art of dressing up”.
British fashion still has status on the world stage, leveraging soft power as a revered incubator of superstar designers. London fashion week retains a strong sense of national pride accordingly, tempered with a very British dose of self-deprecation and humour. The recent high-profile appointments of Sarah Burton to Givenchy, Peter Copping to Lanvin in Paris and Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta in Milan attest to British creatives as a highly prized resource.
Steven Stokey-Daley, designer of SS Daley, made a last-minute decision to join the schedule after plans for a show in Paris last month fell through. “There is a bit of a damp spirit, an empty feeling, to the London schedule at the moment,” admitted the designer before his show. “The data does show that London doesn’t get the same attention [as other fashion cities], so there has been a feeling of designers evacuating a bit. But London has always been good to us, and we thought it would be nice to do something to help bring buzz.” Daley still plans to show in Paris soon. “Romantically, I love London, and we are very much about British culture. But a lot of our most important buyers don’t come to London.”
A recent report by Lefty, which tracks the impact of influencer coverage on brands, reported the Earned Media Value of last September’s London fashion week at $20.9m, compared with $132m for New York, $250m for Milan and $437m for Paris.
The latest SS Daley collection was a celebration of the classic British coat rack, with duffle coats, donkey jackets and trench coats. “I was interested in the political ties of the donkey jacket – of who wore that in Britain, in the 1970s and 1980s,” said the designer. The elegant trench coats tipped a hat to Burberry, London’s one remaining luxury house, where Daley’s name has been mentioned as a future designer.
For Anna Jewsbury, designer of Completedworks jewellery, the incongruity of using a catwalk to show jewellery rather than clothes is exactly the point. “No one expects to see an accessories designer doing a fashion show. It is a way to show people that we have a point of view, a sense of humour, that is a bit different from what other brands are doing,” she said. She joined the ranks of London fashion week designers last year “partly out of naivety – I had no idea how stressful a show would be, or the resources it would take up. But it’s such a thrill.”
Some designers are cutting costs by choosing to sit out alternate fashion weeks, showing just once a year. The fashion system of having a new look each September and March, which once tied the industry to biannual shows, has fallen away in favour of a more fluid era of vibes and microtrends. Conner Ives is one of the designers choosing to show annually, returning this weekend with a show in the Beaufort Bar of the Savoy hotel, based on the 1979 Bob Fosse musical All That Jazz.
