Day three of London Fashion Week was a mixed bag, to say the least. While some labels put on in-person fashion shows, many designers stuck to a virtual format.
Yet despite the mixed mediums, flowers were a key theme across many fashion houses, as was some astonishing cutting.
Erdem
Erdem offered a celebratory wardrobe, aimed at being able to travel once more. Filled with blooms and florals, it was delightfully pretty, but the collection carried a secret message.
For inspiration, the designer looked to the Grand Tour of Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when women set off on wild adventures in corsets and wide brimmed hats. The indomitable women crossed the Sahara, climbed mountains and traversed waterfalls, entirely dressed as if going to a high tea.
To help ease us back into life after the pandemic, Erdem summoned their spirits with dresses, leg of mutton sleeves, faux corseted waists and sumptuous flowery fabrics. While we may not be about to walk to Cairo, Erdem suggests we should treat even the most mundane trip as a new, high adventure, and who can argue with that.
Roland Mouret
The man who made his name with the Galaxy Dress in 2005, returned with another display of his extraordinary skill with fabric. Instead of cutting patterns, Mouret likes to take the cloth and mould it directly around the mannequin resulting in dazzling new ways with cloth. An eye-catching example was a slinky jumpsuit that arrived with a bias cut skirt/apron, and a lady like top that had folded cloth at the neck, origamied to look like a bow.
Richard Malone x Mulberry
With a collection in conjunction with Mulberry, Malone showed how versatile reclaimed materials can be, if tackled with the right attitude. A lovely pair of patch-worked trousers in shades of toffee leather and a two-toned leather coat were both made from off-cuts from the bag makers Mulberry. Elsewhere, Malone took end-of-rolls and transformed them into draped dresses and ruched tops in his co-ed show.
Yuhan Wang
Taking a more sombre tone was Wang, who built an incredibly pretty collection on the horror of violence towards women in a show called, Juliette Has a Gun. And the statistics make for terrifying reading. It is thought that as many as one in three women worldwide will face some sort of domestic or non-domestic attack during her life, from partner abuse to sexual violence.
To this end, Wang's collection clashed the prettiness of flowers with the brutal reality of what women face on a daily basis. Bags arrived shaped as gun holders and ruched dresses came topped with leather gilets. As a mix of hard and fragile, it was startling beautiful.
