The uptown girl nearby looked up from her handheld Oscar-dresses glow, peered around, sighed weightily, and twanged: "I thought London was done with these kinds of shows." Sorry, love: not going to happen. This town always has room for a South-of-the-River cameo that demands you traipse through a biting gale down a barbed-wired-lined industrial-estate alleyway into a derelict warehouse—that s how we roll.
Alasdhair Willis latest piece of brand theater on behalf of Hunter Original saw the models circle an orange runway whose center was a pool of water into which poured a series of naively built irrigation sluices—found-material Chelsea Flower Show stuff. Around the water strode men and women in a compelling collection of well-made and inventive winter streetwear slathered with a heavily organic patina. Among the rural-touched urban highlights were lichen-imprint wool overcoats, fishtail parkas with the same pattern overlaid with colored geography-textbook strata lines, and culottes and trousers in black jumbo corduroy (a British country staple).
Willis label was originally an 1850s, American-founded rubber-shoe maker based in an Edinburgh silk mill, and its products weren t called Hunter until a century or so later. Entirely justly, though, Willis and his team are playing on Hunter s resonance as a country brand with a particular emphasis on Scotland. Thus the company s old-school fishing waders were reimagined as spats-ish monk-strapped shoes with pink paneled uppers, and the quilting on a series of excellent down-filled zippered pants, bombers, and totes was stitched to reflect the top line of Hunter s famous adjustable Wellington boots. Willis clothes would work as well for warehouse raving as they would for deer-stalking, while simultaneously evoking the version of Hunter s history that he is choosing to tell. A good result, then.
