As early-phase Princess Diana transfixed the planet via butterfly eyes, helmet hair, and Bellville Sassoon-sourced flounce, Ray Petri was piecing together Buffalo, a tough new dialect of style cultured in West London. Four decades on—and in the same neighborhood—Preen by Thornton Bregazzi built Resort 16 around these two long-gone extremes.
All the nautical tics—collars, bibs, Bretons—were a nod to Di s for the looks that came blurred by lace or fractured by vector. The predominant print of stripes peppered with chevrons recalled the jazzy graphics overload—Duran Duran art—of then. À la Petri, there was plenty of seemingly ad hoc swathing and incongruous, grandmotherly embroidered floral decoration: softness to amplify the strong. The yellow bellow of a drop-waist dévoré dress was ramped up to a mustard shout. Viscose mix satin-finish dresses, consistently prime performers at Preen, were refigured through soft ruche and hard shoulder. Print collared white shirts came slit at the side to allow an untucked back, while a deep-V bolero jacket with a lemon belt and a contrast piano-key collar sat jauntily over twine-gusseted cropped pants. A print-trimmed, sailor-collared, oversize khaki trench could be old-school Aquascutum remixed, yet the heftier fabrication of its black equivalent had a modern, scuba-synthetic viscose chunkiness. It was a mix that devotees of Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi should go ape for: tough/lady, strong/quirk, 80s nostalgia/right now.
