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If we already didn’t know that it’s a tough time for independent designers, today’s news that Christopher Kane has begun proceedings to shutter his label is proof of the gravity of the situation. Kane is a rare breed, an original talent whose 2006 graduate collection from Central Saint Martins made him an instant fashion star at 23. Straddling the line of good and bad taste, his short body-con dresses in neon lace remain indelible a decade and a half later.
Before he even hit the London Fashion Week runway, he caught the eye of Donatella Versace, who hired him as a consultant and even loaned him shoes for his debut show. Later when she relaunched the Versus line in 2010, she enlisted Kane to head it up and he delivered witty and playful collections for the brand for three years.
Around the time of Kane’s graduation, London had become a sleepy fashion town—an anomaly considering all the young talent the city’s design schools attracted. Around the millennium, London talent was being scooped up by houses in Paris or Milan (as was the case with Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, and Riccardo Tisci, among others, and John Galliano and Alexander McQueen before them). But Kane—and his sister Tammy, with whom he worked from the very beginning—was part of a new cohort of independent designers that included Erdem Moralioglu, Mary Katrantzou, Jonathan Saunders, Roksanda Ilincic, and the Meadham Kirchhoff duo. Together, they lit up the young London fashion scene. By 2009 the city had become so hot it didn’t surprise anyone when Christopher Bailey decided to bring Burberry back home from Milan.
But Kane wasn’t a one-trick body-con pony. His fourth collection, for fall 2008, was inspired by Planet of the Apes, which figured literally with images of shrieking gorillas plastered across otherwise very prim and proper little black dresses and more figuratively in the thousands of circular fabric pieces that he sewed together to create softly sculptural dresses that both concealed and revealed the form within. Another memorable collection was fall 2012, when a live-nude-drawing class inspired the silhouettes of reclining nudes that decorated elegant and romantic lace numbers in shades of blue, orange, pink, black, and white. And yes, like so much of what he did, they were a bit naughty. A decade in, he was still innovating. His 10-year anniversary show in 2017 featured a collaboration with Crocs—a full year before they would debut on the Balenciaga runway and cause a furor. Kane’s were decorated with rocks and crystals, like a science experiment.
When he name-checked The Joy of Sex, the 1972 illustrated guide to sex by the British author Alex Comfort, as inspiration for a 2019 show, no one could pretend to be surprised. Sex had been a subtext of his work from the beginning, only here it was made explicit in a collection where latex and chain embellishments took center stage. Two dresses from this season found perfect wearers—and a perfect audience—when Kane attended 2019’s Met Gala with Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke, the stars of Girls, which had ushered in a new era of sex positivity and realness on HBO. (Dunham was the Rubberist, a person with a fetish for rubber, and Kirke the Looner, or someone who derives pleasure from balloons—rubbing, blowing, and popping them.) Last season extravagant ruffled red vinyl skirts mingled on his runway with jersey dresses featuring photorealistic prints of chicks, piglets, and rats designed by AI. He never lost his visionary POV—or his cheeky sense of humor (witness the “More Joy”–branded vibrators he launched for Valentine’s Day in 2020).
Kane’s vision has always been wide-ranging and unique, and he never dulled it down for one market or another. In 2009 Natalie Massenet, Net-a-Porter’s founder, said her team was “noticing that women who like Oscar de la Renta are also happy to buy Christopher, because they like its femininity and quality.” In 2013, Kering purchased a majority stake in the brand. During this time, his clothes got more obviously luxurious—evident in the materials and the more couture-like construction of some of the clothes. He also opened a flagship store on Mount Street, a posh address in London. In 2018 Kering sold the company back to Kane and his sister, who remained equal partners.
I’m not an Oscar de la Renta woman, but I’ve always been attracted to the way Kane plays with materials and imagery. His woman was put together but still a little fucked up. (The two can coexist!) She (and I) loved a weird texture, something that would suddenly show up, unexpected, that would interrupt your rhythm, that would make you do a double take and ask, “Wait, how is this put together?” I’ve owned a few of his pieces throughout the years, and they always made me feel like a realized version of who I would like to be. Even the ones that are no longer in my closet—like the gorilla body-con dress I traded a Balenciaga denim skirt for with a friend who had modeled in Kane’s show or a pleated picnic-plaid yellow skirt I wore to a few job interviews—still are bearers of really good memories (even if I didn’t get the jobs).
A few months ago, when I needed a dress for Vogue’s pre-Met party, where the dress code was “Clutch Your Pearls,” it was a Kane black leather-esque shift dress that came to the rescue. “If you want sexual tension with an injection of sophistication, Kane is your man,” Sarah Mower wrote in her review of that spring 2022. When I got married in 2019, I wanted something cool for the City Hall ceremony and the answer was naturally Christopher Kane. I found a short-sleeve white sheer dress with quote-unquote taped-up white lace appliqués from the spring 2013 collection. (The soundtrack for that show was “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.) I couldn’t have dreamed up a more weirdly poetic piece for the occasion.
That this news came a day after one of the biggest, most expensive shows in the history of fashion (Pharrell Williams’s Louis Vuitton debut) says something about the state of the industry. The big are getting bigger, and the small are struggling. Kane is too talented not to get snapped up by one of those bigger brands should he indeed sell and move on. He is far from the first independent brand (nor likely the last) to close up shop; still, I can’t help but feel particularly sad about this one. But there’s a consolation. In recent years, Kane has taken to painting and shared much of his work on Instagram. When the business of being creative is overtaken by the business of being a business, there’s beauty in the fact that what remains is the joy of art for art’s sake.
