I’ve just shut my laptop on the colourful Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show. The main event of the British gardening calendar has moved online and blossomed into something else. No doubt the useful videos fueled a boom in lockdown plant sales. But it also gave me a fix, and not just for my current obsession with espalier training (encouraging a stubborn pear tree to grow up a wall) but I found myself wishing to add a little of the fashion that May in London usually heralds. Think Erdem dresses amongst the clematis, or an archive Prada floral nestled in the winning garden.
Blessed by bountiful sun, it’s easy to lament the usual events of the season. We won’t be celebrating Glastonbury 2020 (until June 2021), and we’ll miss the Wimbledon players in their crisp whites on the manicured verdant, and the grand slam style of the spectators. Goodbye to the Queen s daily wave at Ascot and her perfectly executed colour coordination visible from her open top carriage. The anticipated opening of Greg Hersov’s Hamlet at the Young Vic (with Cush Jumbo in the lead), has been rescheduled to Spring next year. And the Tokyo Olympics is now over a year away—which we’ll still miss even though it’s a long way from the British Isles.
One of the biggest cultural highs was set to be the David Hockney: Drawing from Life exhibit at The National Portrait Gallery which closed after two weeks. “One of the saddest emails I had to send was to David Hockney to tell him we were closing his exhibition,” shares Dr. Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery (and Hockney’s fellow Yorkshireman). Of course, Hockney’s response was brilliant. “He sent me a picture of a new work, ‘they can’t cancel the spring’, created in his home studio in Normandy, an isolated spot where he can observe the arrival of spring unfolding and continue to draw undisturbed.” David went on to tell him he had already made about 15 drawings and was planning to draw them again and again with the small leaves and then the blossom and then the fruit. “I look forward to seeing his other drawings as the spring and now summer unfolds,” says Cullinan. Such optimism is distinct and cheering, as is Hockney’s amazing palette he uses in his work and personal style. Trying out an homage to Hockney with your wardrobe seems timely, and if you want to try, his signatures are a Breton top, an intense pink, his signature Komono watch. “I prefer living in colour” as the artist once said.
Another void will be the landmark 50th year of the Glastonbury Festival. Glastonbury captures the British public’s imagination; I should not be surprised if people start pitching tents in their gardens by late June (perhaps listening to the planned headliners Kendrick Lamar, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift?). Catching up with co-organiser Emily Eavis, she says: “After the initial personal devastation, then the shock at watching this pandemic unfold, there have been moments of unusual peace and stillness that we would never normally have at this time of year.” Eavis says her lockdown uniform has ironically been akin to her festival go-to,“I’m a big fan of a jumpsuit, or any kind of all-in-one.” She is thinking of this time as a fallow year. “Every five years we have a break and the land rests too. It gives us all a chance to come back with completely fresh plans and ideas. “ On the festival weekend she intends to stay lowkey on the farm in Somerset. “We would love to see friends, if we can by then. But that’s looking unlikely, so it will most probably be me, my husband and our three children, sitting around the fire. We can show them some of the old sets too, which will be on the BBC that weekend.”
“I think until we’re in July it won’t really sink in that I’m not there walking on Centre Court and feeling that grass beneath my feet,” says Britain’s number one tennis player Johanna Konta about Wimbledon. She has been trying to maintain “something that resembles training, which has not been easy when you’re in the lounge with two dogs running around your ankles and stealing your equipment.” She’s just starting to hit the court again with one of her coaches (with strict social distancing policies in place), but will miss “that first hit on grass coming from the clay in Paris.” She wears her retro-inspired high performance Ellesse whites, but notes: “It’s not just the players that dress up at Wimbledon though.” She loves to take in the effort put into the outfits in the stands. “Seeing the suits and dresses, big hats - it just feels so romantic and impressive.”
Enjoying art out of town is also still in question, even with loosening restrictions. The work of British Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor has been installed in the majestic Palladian setting of Houghton Hall and is awaiting the green light to open. “It feels very spoiling to have it to ourselves but sad also not to be able to share it as yet” says Rose, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley. She is isolating with her husband and young family in Norfolk at Houghton Hall. “Seeing artworks in nature is always going to be a different experience to seeing them in a gallery space. The pieces are set along formal avenues lined with trees or with the house as a backdrop; whilst others you need to discover in wilderness areas or a disused courtyard, lending a mysterious quality to the works” adds Rose Cholmondeley, who is looking forward to hopefully celebrating the opening later this summer. “My ideal would be a drink on the roof of the house with Anish, the curator, my family and the Houghton team looking down on the show. Perhaps it will be hot in which case I will probably be wearing a really pretty dress from Thierry Colson, bought pre-lockdown.”
As we make the best of 2020, let’s enjoy it at home and dress for the occasion. We can still dress for the summer we want, and relive the highlights of years past and celebrate at home. Or as Eavis puts it: “For many generations we have needed to gather in nature, listen to music and dance, we need it more than ever now!” Choosing fetching florals for Chelsea, engaging in Glastonbury’s eclecticism or nodding to Kapoor’s sculptures, here are the pieces to charm now.
