London is thinking long—sinuously, serpentinely long in the case of Marios Schwab s incredibly impactful Fall silhouette. Schwab is the first to completely nail the new look in a bravely exaggerated form: smooth, tubular, hobbling stretch dresses to the ankle, with strange textures breaking through their surfaces. Some of them had patches of under-things—jeans or poufy upswellings of flesh-colored Lycra—rising through roughly scissored slits. Others were covered with filigree-fine laser cutouts engineered to look like sooty, flaking Victorian William Morris wallpaper.
It was strange, it was sinister—and mesmerizing. Without doubt, it threw up a glaring issue about how anyone could wear it as is (if you wanted to perambulate across a room within five minutes, forget it). But by the end, the cumulative effect neutralized that kind of pragmatic niggle. This was Schwab s most conceptual collection yet, arguably one that is powerful enough to push the reset button in how we see proportions.
What led him here was a reading of a Victorian proto-feminist novel, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by a collaboration with the artist Tom Gallant on the prints. Those influences scarcely matter to the results, though, which look new and "out there" in a way few designers dare in these days of commercial constraints. Not that there weren t salable-looking, impeccably made navy peacoats (two, tramline straight, were elongated to hit the ankle). The point is that this is one of those symbolically charged collections that may be a bellwether. Longer is beginning to feel better: It s a visual that s been moving inward from the margins since Roland Mouret and Jonathan Saunders also dropped their hemlines to mid-calf. If it seems crazy now, let s wait and see: The judgment call will only come after every other designer has had his say.
