LONDON FASHION WEEK: 24 Hours in the Life of a Catwalk
Leading fashion journalist Julia Robson reports for After Nyne on the difference between Fashion Week time-slots, and 24 hours in the life of fashion.
Post-show, as house lights flick on and reality pricks the magic bubble of the last six or seven minutes, the audience must consider the legacy of a catwalk show. Show notes on seats help reveal a designer’s inspiration/s. What time of day a show takes place also makes such a difference.
Mid-morning at London Fashion Week (LFW) is always a highlight. Music is mellow. Day Three of London Fashion Week finds the jet lagged crowd (last week they were watching shows in New York) more chilled. You could have set your watch by entering Stephen Tai’s presentation at Elms Lester Painting Rooms in London’s Covent Garden. A light, airy room filled with bespectacled models in crisp, school girlish dresses (his muse was nerdish Hermione Grainger). Coffee and biscuits were a perfect elevenses treat.
No celebrities yet (still too early) an hour later at Eudon Choi, this time at the official LFW HQ: Brewer Street car park with its glass roof. Here, by midday music is ramped up. Designers fight for the one o’clock spot. This is the best time to livestream a show. The US is waking up and China is already shopping. Eveningwear looks more appetising than at breakfast show slots. So too the blue lipstick everywhere for SS17.
Afternoons shows take on a restrained frenzy in mood and clothes. There’s only so much you can get away with when so many venues in London use natural daylight. Set designers often enhance this clean, white, art space-feel with installations like at Mary Katrantzou and J. JS. Lee.
Post watershed 7pm shows have attitude. On Friday the On/Off grungy venue at Vinyl Factory in Marshall Street, Soho, saw punky singer, Lucia Fontaine, belting out music to a crowd of fashion groupies.
As the fashion pack pushed their way through a bustling West End on Saturday night to Gareth Pugh (8pm), the bright lights/Soho fights acted as a moody aperitif. Once inside, night time Brewer Street, takes on a noir décor. You could just about make out hip hop singer, will.i.am, front row rocking a cowboy hat and dressed entirely in black.
Pugh’s show - inspired by his project working on costumes for the Francesco Cavalli opera, Eliogabolo, currently playing at the Palais Garnier in Paris - was dark in colour and theme. The soundtrack was beating drums. The opera, based on the life of a child emperor of Imperial Rome who becomes an obscene tyrant, translated into models-as-soldiers, wearing sun ray print shields as bustiers and gladiator giant platform boots. They marched down the runway with slivers of chiffon as asymmetric skirts flowing around them.
The collection was night sky black and – a colour emerging as key for SS17 – ‘Cadbury’ purple. By day, when colour is reflected in sunlight, it can turn catwalk shows into a synesthetic experience. You could almost ‘smell’ the bright custard yellows at Fashion East.
Finally, the ‘morning after the night before’ runway shows are strange experiences. Guests roll up in giant, dark sunglasses (hangover). Etiquette is simple. No one talks – or eats. So no coffee or canapé breath. No champagne you ask? No. 24 hour freebie ‘fashion food’ consists of packets of Propercorn, 100-calorie popcorn with pastel packaging regardless of time or day.
Julia Robson is a fashion journalist and lecturer at Regents University London www.regents.ac.uk
