The work that is most exciting to me this season is that which is based on expert patternmaking. The art of puzzling how best to have fabric work in tandem with or around the body, rather than relying on decoration or logos, is foundational. It also requires a deep familiarity with materials and their responsiveness. Sharon Wauchob is one such fabric whisperer who wields her shears with precision. Her mastery of the bias cut is complete, and it is complemented with a knack for unstuffy tailoring.
That oblique line—and fall’s spiral cut—is a metaphor for the designer’s new, singular path in fashion. It has been almost a decade since Wauchob moved from Paris to London, abandoned the runway, and went into reset mode. Drawing on her past experiences, Wauchob works closely and collaboratively with specialist ateliers, most of them local, to co-develop not only garments but a whole new approach to fashion. Rather than engaging in the chaos and flux of constant reinvention, Wauchob is focused on evolving her hero or icon pieces while slowly introducing new ones into the fold. Time is this designer’s ally. Items that have become bestsellers, she reported, often weren’t so immediately. “In a different environment, those pieces wouldn’t sustain their life,” she said, but now she can watch them “grow to their full potential.” To be clear, Wauchob’s slower take on fashion is not akin to listening to a song on repeat. In reworking a piece, she’s not just changing a color or a fabric; rather, she’s always going back to the why and the reason for a garment’s existence.
One of Wauchob’s goals was to approach function “in an almost artistic, creative way.” A travel-ready coat that was as light as the wind was made of a wafer-fine wool with a silk-chiffon lining that hung loose in the arm so that if you rolled up the outer sleeve, the ghostlike inner one would be exposed. That piece achieved “the idea of intimacy expressed outwardly” that the designer wrote of in her notes.
Wauchob also wanted to produce not only garments that can be worn in different ways—a marabou tunic (with hand-placed feathers), for example, can also be worn as a skirt—but hybrid accessory garments (accessaments?). “I think if you really know the product and know how it is constructed or know the origins of where it came from, there’s a versatility in what you can do with it,” she said. A few seasons ago she introduced an outsize scrunchie that could be worn as a peplum or otherwise arranged on the body. For fall there were bandanas to layer, as well as scarves attached to a button-down shirt and a sweater. A spangled neck tie doubled as a necklace. Also neck-centric was the opening look, a satin-front, wool-back coat with an integrated double-sided long, wafting scarf. A pair of carrot-leg pants was constructed with folds in such a way that eliminated the need for side seams, and another topper in inky lacquered black with hand-applied strass bore a resemblance to a coromandel screen, a portable folding device used to divide open areas. Wauchob isn’t one for putting up walls; she sculpts soft, airy, scrimlike garments in which the separation between masculine and feminine, the boudoir and the boulevard, dissolves.
