Palmer Harding

Like many not-rich-as-Croesus design houses in the digital age, Palmer Harding is wrestling with a thorny question: Is the fleeting attention gained via a runway show worth the investment and attention required to stage it?

This season, Matthew Harding and Levi Palmer will test the hypothesis that there is a way to better benefit by investing differently. At an appointment in their East London studio—just next to Markus Lupfer’s—Harding explained: “We’ve been thinking about whether a show is relevant to our women. So we’re going to try and spread the costs into advertising, as well as events and initiatives with our women.”

Those initiatives have already begun in a video interview series entitled p//h balanced, whose first subject is a prominent British human rights lawyer named Alison Macdonald, a confirmed fan of the house. Next up is Gabby Edlin, founder of Bloody Good Period, a nonprofit that works to ensure universal access to menstrual supplies in today’s increasingly dystopian Britain.

You can’t have womenswear collections without women who want to wear them, so this shift in focus—to cultivate a group of like-minded clients who might just be minded to like the garments—makes sense.

As for those garments, well, they looked good worn by Eden Clark in the printed photographs blue-tacked to the design studio wall, and they were fun to rifle through on the rack once talk turned to them. According to Harding (who, in the absence of Palmer on a fabric mission to Italy, was delivering the spiel), this collection was part of the ongoing interplay between his aesthetic, “late ’70s, when everything is soft, long, and exudes femininity,” and that of Harding, “in the early ’80s when, bam, everything goes sharp, hard, and angular.” There was plenty of focus on house signature shirting—in collar shapes that morphed into storm flaps and decorative buttonhole edging and much more—as well as a convincing exploration of out-there outerwear in house-developed fabrics. Interesting clothes for interesting women presented at an interesting moment for the brand.