This season, Natasha Zinko drafted two fledgling artisans into her team: her parents, Oleg and Margharita, both in their 70s. In the perennial chaos of her West London studio, they could be found screwing hardware onto platform combat boots and crocheting sock-boots a mere 24 hours before the presentation, while her son, Ivan, put the final flourishes on the show notes. It was a familiar setting for the Ukrainian designer, whose first encounters with fashion came as a teenager making jeans for her family to sell at street markets in post-Soviet Odessa in the 1990s. “Those were challenging, complicated times,” she said. “Factories were scarce, so everything we wore had to be homemade. It taught me that there are no limits to what you can achieve with your hands.”
There wasn’t much denim this season—an acid-wash jacket here, a squiggly-seamed jean there—but the family unit was invoked in other ways, namely through the collection’s make-do-and-mend construction. Grandad’s plaid shirt was stuffed with crinoline to form a tutu-skirted dress, and reworked as cargo shorts; his leather jackets became bodycon dresses, worn with neon-pink push-up bralettes—“the Wonderbra was huge when I was a teen, so I had to mix them in with the wider family wardrobe,” the designer said—while his tailoring was reconstructed into column dresses with floppily draped waistbands as necklines. The most fertile soil, though, was grandma’s vintage mink coats: doubled up as two-in-one numbers, reconstituted as corsets, or used for trimmings on a brocade opera coat and a spaghetti-strap chiffon slip. “There was a period of 10 years of my mom wearing—and altering—her mom’s coat,” Zinko said. “She was upcycling before it was a thing.”
On the subject of families, cheers reverberated when the former Spice Girl Mel B and her daughter, Phoenix Brown, appeared in the network of Victorian tunnels that served as catwalk. Zinko, though, was more excited to discuss her ongoing collaboration with Havaianas, which included a sensible court shoe made totally nonsensical by a flip-flop thong fanning across its toe, and a pair of stacked sandals wrapped in trompe-l œil leather parcel tape. Just as tongue-in-cheek were the vinyl skirts resembling upside-down reusable shopping bags, and sleeveless skirt sets made from tea towels, because “family business always happens in the kitchen.” Belt buckles were cast from resin-covered bubble gum the designer had spent the previous days chewing on. “It’s trashy!” she said. “And trendy!” The line between the two is a challenge to decipher.
