Just when they said subversive young London underground club creativity is dead in cost-of-living depressed Brexitland, along comes Olly Shinder. Just as you’d never suppose a young Londoner could hone a vision of evening elegance, there’s Standing Ground by Michael Stewart. Just as you might have assigned athletic wear to a non-fashion sub-category—along comes Johanna Parv, powerfully fusing function, feminism and chic in ways the top brass at sports brands have never been capable of imagining.
Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East show is where these three distinctly different London-based designers made their personal worlds visible today.
Olly Shinder
Queer cultures have been a primary source of fashion creativity in London for generations. Lee Alexander McQueen formed a good part of his incendiary design identity in the gay pubs and clubs of ’90s London; before that, there were the Blitz club and Taboo in the 1980s. Olly Shinder, the Fashion East newcomer, made his own 2020s immersion in queer night spaces and subcultural community values manifest, joined by a roster of queer collaborators and artists—including Wolfgang Tillmans, who mixed his sound track. “We all party together. I wanted to capture what it is to be a part of that in London now,” said Shinder.
British fashion education culture has also bred a new generation of graduates who are speaking about their heritages in their work. London-born Shinder opened his collection with snap-trimmed shorts that distinctly smacked of the shape of lederhosen and a Bavarian red gingham shirt. “My identity is Jewish and German, and I have just got my German passport for the first time,” he said. “For my family I’ve been learning German, I love the language.” That consciousness was hybridized and intersected with classic homoerotic clothing archetypes—an upside down white singlet, zipper slashes (one open to way below a butt), doubled, cutaway running shorts, hi-viz utility jackets and looped shower hoses. “We’ve basically taken the workwear world and turned it into a real fantasy,” he said. “All of this is me putting myself into it in so many ways.”
Standing Ground
“I wanted them to have this almost menacing sensuality,” said Michael Stewart of the third collection of sinuously attenuated silhouettes he’s shown at Fashion East. His sculpturally fluid aesthetic, tied into the ancient standing stones and landscapes of his native Ireland is not inspired—he wanted to make it clear—“by hocus-pocus spirituality. I’m really into science and fact, and learning about geology and learning about continental drift and evolution and the development of the earth.”
Nevertheless: focussing on the geological makeup—the fossils—in the standing stones took him to somewhere quite mind-bending enough. They’re there because the land that became Ireland was once at the equator, in a warm, prehistoric, disappeared ocean named Tethys, the title of his collection. The frond-like formation of Charnia, thought to be the earliest life-form on earth, became his inspiration for obsessively embedding beads between two layers of jersey—an embroidery technique that also practically took him aeons to make in his studio at Sarabande in Hackney.
Dresses, sinuous skirts, fitted tops, bras: it’s easy to see where and upon on whom Standing Ground will find its social standing.
Johanna Parv
Johanna Parv presents a challenge to describe. Simplistic terms like ‘athletic wear’ or ‘ women’s sportswear’ don’t do her justice. Nor is ‘hybridization’ right, ie. the grafting together of two different clothing genres (like Sacai), because what Parv does is seamlessly built for action rather than a fashion statement.
She’s really working in r&d for a decarbonizing world where cars will (ideally) have become much less of a thing, and cycling clothes ought to perform aesthetically better for women’s lives. If she drapes a half-skirt over cycling shorts, the skirt will actually hitch up and over a shoulder to form a bag protector. She tailors cycling tops and zippy tops as ‘suits’ in technical fabric which cool the body, and includes silicone shoulder patches “so your bag won’t slip off your shoulder.” She constructs “tunnels” in the back of shorts, in which an anorak can be carried hands-free, but whose sleeve volumes also create silhouettes that almost suggest 18th-century panniers or 19th-century bustles.
Probably, she’s closest to Helmut Lang’s urban-dweller code of design from the ’90s, but then again, refreshingly, there’s nothing rear-view mirror about her work. She’s one of those rare designers who are facing towards the future.
