On a frosty Tuesday evening in the streets surrounding London’s Smithfield Market, it wasn’t difficult to spot those heading to the John Alexander Skelton show. His loyal army of fans could be seen traipsing through the lamp-lit alleyways in calf-skimming boiled wool overcoats and louche tailoring trimmed with dozens of buttons, as if having stepped straight out of a Victorian novel. The time-bending aspect of Skelton’s vision became further apparent when stepping into his venue this season: the extraordinary monument to London’s history that is the church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, with its 12th-century Romanesque arches and Gothic Revival tombs. There’s nowhere in the city quite like it, and few designers in the city make clothes that could match up to its head-turning interiors.
Thankfully, Skelton is one of them. While he has spent the past few seasons showcasing his collections via exquisitely produced look books and exhibitions, no formula lets his vision sing quite like the theatrical flair of his shows. As the eerie, twinkling synths and siren-like wail of This Mortal Coil’s “Dreams Made Flesh” boomed out over the speakers and the space was plunged into darkness, a procession of Skelton’s muses—an all-ages cast of men bearing closer resemblance to extras on Lord of the Rings than your typical runway model—circulated through the aisles and eventually down the center of the nave clutching brass candlesticks, the light flickering to create spellbinding shadows across the audience seated in the pews and the stone walls beyond. Following the collective intake of breath as the song faded to silence, you could have heard a pin drop.
“Whenever I really need to concentrate, or to focus on the more creative side of my job, I put on This Mortal Coil—it’s almost like a soundtrack to my work,” Skelton said after the show. “It feels as if there’s a kind of imagined world behind the music that I wanted to capture in this collection.” Rather than head down a more literal route, Skelton’s sonic inspiration manifested in clothes that leaned towards the Gothic (as opposed to the more earthy, folksy aesthetic he’s been exploring the past few seasons). “Taking the inspiration from the music gave me a lot of freedom,” he said. The color palette may have been dominated by deep blacks, as well as a blazing shade of vermillion that appeared across gorgeous jacquard velvet trousers and two-pieces, but the end result was something that felt dapper rather than heavy, in part thanks to the styling: playful metal crowns created by Skelton’s regular collaborator Slim Barrett, or a splash of lime green in a silk neck scarf, or the elegant leather slippers worn with every look.
With the church as backdrop, the billowing full-length coats also carried a whisper of the ecclesiastical; it turned out that their shape was inspired in part by a handful of priest’s gowns Skelton’s brother picked up at a flea market in Rome. But what impressed most, as always, was Skelton’s ability to take these historical references and reformulate them into something that feels covetable right now. Even among all the bombast and drama of the show, the impeccable quality of the individual pieces shone, whether the chunky linen of a block-printed shirt or the butter-soft corduroy of a pair of high-waisted trousers. Watch the spiffily dressed men in the front row closely enough as they erupted into applause at the end of the show, and you could see them mentally earmarking the pieces for their personal orders.
