Vivienne Westwood LFW AW 20/21

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Vivienne Westwood began designing in 1971 along with her then partner Malcolm McLaren in London. At the time they used their shop at 430 Kings Road, London, to showcase their ideas and designs. With their changing ideas of fashion came the change of not only the name of the shop but also the décor. It was in 1976 when Westwood and McLaren defined the street culture of Punk with Seditionaries. 

By the end of the seventies Vivienne Westwood was already considered a symbol of the British avant-garde and for Autumn/Winter 1981 she showed her first catwalk presentation at Olympia in London. Westwood then turned to traditional Savile Row tailoring techniques, using British fabrics and 17th and 18th century art for inspiration. 

1989 was the year that Vivienne met Andreas Kronthaler, who would later become her husband and long-time design partner, as well as Creative Director of the brand. In 2004 the Victoria & Albert museum, London, hosted a Vivienne Westwood retrospective exhibition to celebrate her then 34 years in fashion – the largest exhibition ever devoted to a living British fashion designer. In 2006, her contribution to British Fashion was officially recognized when she was appointed Dame of the British Empire by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2007 was awarded the ‘Outstanding Achievement in Fashion’ at the British Fashion Awards in London. 

Vivienne Westwood is one of the last independent global fashion companies in the world. At times thought provoking, this brand is about more than producing clothes and accessories. Westwood continues to capture the imagination, and raise awareness of environmental and human rights issues. With a design record spanning over forty years, Vivienne Westwood is now recognized as a global brand and Westwood herself as one of the most influential fashion designers, and activists, in the world today. 

FASHIONADO

Fall 2020 Menswear Art School

Slow, proud, and graceful, they emerged from the smoke-licked back of the runway. Their feet were bare but for powdered chalk, their eyes painted red or contact-lensed to be pupil-less. A piano’s soaring chords were engineered for emotion. One model in a pair of high-rise tailored trousers had his chest hair artfully styled to spell out Art School.

I hadn’t seen an Art School show since back in its boundary breaking MAN days in 2017, and on the face of it this one was consistent with its original Theo Adams–choreographed formula of unrepentantly celebratory dramatics: We’re LGBTQ+ and if you don’t like it, bad luck. Personally, I like it; however, between 2017 and now it feels like representation of non-cis sexualities—thanks much to Art School and others—is rightly well established in, if not the wider world, then certainly in the narrow realm of runway fashion. The ceiling that Art School once railed against has been rightfully shattered.

This means that the inherent subversive tension that imbued the original shows feels diluted. Thankfully, the real business of this business—you know, clothes—was well served when you looked beyond the chest hair. The press release spoke of a collaboration with the wonderful artist Maggi Hambling, but sadly this was hard to detect. Yet what did uplift were some of the garments: The slashed outerwear was tempered by some quite beautifully executed non-razored pieces that were transgressive in this context for being clothes that any unreconstructed norm with a sense of taste would, could, and should rightly hanker after. The same applied to the button-up dress that both prefaced (in black) and postscript-ed (in white) the show.

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

E. Tautz Fall 2020 Menswear

“Fashion, a world of consumption and destruction that heaps misery upon human beings and reaps damage on the planet on a scale almost no other industry comes close to matching.” Phew. It’s fair to say that Patrick Grant sounded pretty agonized in this E. Tautz collection’s press release. Happily, that agony resulted in a 26-look set of clothes that prompted, well, if not quite ecstasy, then certainly something much improved upon misery.

Grant is a designer whose refined throwback sensibility—Savile Row 2.0.2.0—very often results in beautifully silhouetted and fabricated menswear which sometimes skates perilously over the thin ice of anachronism. Here we saw it again in a collection that combined hints of lubricious decadence (especially the sexy, luxe-trashy asymmetrically paneled Louboutin pumps over tube socks) with wide-eyed schoolboy Englishness (or at least Edinburgh-flavored Englishness) in surgically cut post-Oxford bags and matchy-matchy tropical twill chinos and blousons.

As shoehorned-in via that opening quote, however, the emphasis here was on sustainability. About 50% of the collection Grant reckoned was made from repurposed fabrics, much of it provided by Astco, an industrial recycler whose boss happens to be a Grant bespoke client at Norton & Sons and who pitched in with the denim and shirting. Then there was the darning and patching, executed by students from the Royal College of Needlework (also an often-time collaborator of Sarah Burton’s). This saw irregular check patches insinuated upon herringbone outerwear, or herringbone patches upon check suiting, or layers of differently washed denim patched onto denim. In the suiting especially it was interesting, adding a depth of patina and pentimento, a roughness, to that most surface-defined of menswear genres.

Backstage Grant railed like a Shakespearean lead with a BBC reality show contract about the conflicting instincts that mutual fealty to fashion and ecological survival stir up, then disclosed he has started darning his clothes, which in turn prompted a very senior and glamorous Hearst editor to disclose that she now darns her pantyhose (is Hearst in trouble?). The fundamental point about E. Tautz is that if you like it then buy it because the quality is superb. You will wear it until you, not it, are due for recycling. Unless we all decide to go naked, that’s about as ecologically sound as fashion can be.

Source: Vogue

FASHIONADO

Bianca Saunders RTW Fall 2020

Bianca Saunders re-created dancehall parties for her presentation and focused on movement and contrast for her new collection. The space was sectioned off into curtained partitions where models grooved to dancehall music. “I wanted to create a peep show idea of the dancehall scene, because dance can be quite sexual and when you’re at a club, despite being surrounded by people, you’re very much in your own moment,” she mused.

Despite their tailored construction, the clothes were designed to dance in. Saunders curved seams, twisted fabrics and moved shoulder seams closer to the neck so that it would shift. Long overcoats had double hems that moved easily over long and loose shirts. A bleached and fluid denim ensemble stole the show.

By altering its construction, Saunders breathed new life into these men’s wear staples.

Source: WWD

FASHIONADO