It’s not often that you dine in the crypt of a church while it is being used as the backstage area for a fashion show. For a lucky group of rubberneckers, Matty Bovan made that happen this evening. The backstage was situated in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and with the exception of a 40-ish-seater dining table that ran through it, all appeared as backstages tend to. The beauty teams (Miranda Joyce, the Lisa Eldridge agency) and hair crew (Claire Grech) had mostly done their work but were still perfecting it. The stylist (Bovan himself) was zooming around between Ashley Graham, Winnie Harlow, and their fellow castmates, adding one last layer of scrutiny and care to looks that contained garments—Bovan’s 15th collection—that were clearly already the subjects of many hours of handiwork and creativity. Acielle was shooting like a trouper.
Stopping for a moment to sit alongside Vogue Runway, Bovan said: “I love the idea of doing a show where the front row gets to see the behind the scenes, close up. And they get to see the textiles and the details.” His plan was a great one, with just one flaw: So rich was the Bistrotheque-authored lobster pie, and so zesty its gem salad, and so more-ish the Tanqueray No. Ten cocktails,
that many of the guests were understandably as focused on the vittles as the details. However, as the lineup took shape, professionalism kicked in.
Even in the dimness of backstage, a collection that Bovan said was “a beacon of light” during a tough year was luminescent with labor and thought. Each piece was conceived as a sculpture built around its wearer and a cladding of Calvin Klein underwear. The dresses were controlled explosions of upcycled fabric, bleached and overdyed, whose laboriously curated multitudinous scraps twisted and whorled around each other in order to ignite a whole. Embroidery on corsetry and Bovan-penned script inscribed a further seam of energy and meaning into them. Although created with immense craft and seriousness, the end was joyful and infectious: Choreographed by Simon Donnellon, the models moved into a small show space (we watched onscreen) to inhabit Bovan’s clothes with a series of verve-filled poses.
So rich, so analog, and so instinctive is Bovan’s practice that you wonder how he knows when to stop working on a piece—that it is done. He said, “Well, it’s like doing a painting or sculpture. I keep going back, a day later, a week later: You know, it’s just a gut instinct.” And he added, “In a world of digital and AI, I want to do real stuff—real life, physical. My world is complete fantasy, but it is here in reality.” Bovan is breaking the boundaries of convention in clothing like no one else.
