Olly Shinder returned for an unprecedented (I’m pretty sure) fourth season at Fashion East when he closed this evening’s show. So why was he back? He told it like it is: “Maybe I felt I needed it. In London, you know, it is a really difficult landscape at the moment as a young designer.” So what would make it less difficult? “Gosh,” Shinder said, then took a breath. “Well, the difficult things are the overheads. The costs of running a brand. You know, whether it’s rent, paying staff, paying factories, all of that. A nice idea that Raphaelle Moore from Fashion East said to me is that it would be so cool if the BFC [British Fashion Council] literally had a factory through which it could support all the young designers to actually create their pieces. To help us produce them. Because this [collection] is a fantasy. I’m showing and saying this is what I could do. But the reality is, am I really going to be able to produce it? Probably not.”
Sometimes even the most resilient are pushed toward a state of resignation. But Shinder’s collection (the final one in this season’s gallery) transmitted none of that. Instead, it extracted codes from the underground, the utilitarian, and the military and transferred them into an uptown wardrobe with a seditious twist. All of the designers today started their Fashion East journey as “menswear designers,” yet all today showed plenty of womenswear. Shinder’s included fitted dresses tailored in black camouflage netting and a hybridized evening dress evolved from a traditional English workingman’s donkey jacket.
Nuba’s Cameron Williams and Jebi Labembika, who showed second in the run today, were similarly down on now (with good reason). The coin print overwritten with “ZERO POUNDS” suggested why. “It’s scary right now and uncertain,” said Williams. “And that really knocks your confidence. It kind of makes you feel like you’re not worth success.” The designers took that indictment as a starting point and built from it, presenting a collection of ingeniously layered and wrapped garments that spoke to the idea of cocooning—of sheltering in place. Jersey suiting and rib-knit dresses featured psychologically insulating contours. The satin flashes of blue cobalt were there to assert that successful endurance will be rewarded with clearer conditions in some as-yet-unclear future moment. This was a collection that processed pessimism into optimism through creative endeavor. Last season, Olympia Schiele’s label was called Loutre. This season, due to a copyright issue, that had morphed into the family name Louther. There was transformation at play in the collection too, here for less prosaic reasons. Palace skater Kyle Wilson modeled an opening look of soft suiting in tobacco tones that looked almost Armani-esque beneath its upcycled patched shearling jacket. Women’s tailoring was belted with sections of a biker jacket, and men’s tailoring was overlaid with fragments of workwear.
Schiele was addressing the categorization of clothing within the wardrobe of self-identity, melding and blending forms in order to expand beyond her own streetwear provenance without necessarily rejecting it. It was also observational, both about herself and her peers. She said: “You do different things. I have so many friends who go to an office job, you know; they look good in both a suit and the clothing they wear outside of work. And there’s so much duality to people.” Pushing the mutual inclusivity of typically segregated clothing genres seems like a fruitful territory to prospect.
