Last season, Emilia Wickstead opened a portal to her darker and more dangerous side, offering a looser, androgynous take on her signatures shown in an industrial basement. It was an impressive flexing of her muscles as a designer, and a showcase for her ability to lean more outré. But this time around, rather than simply double down on those experiments or pivot back to something more buttoned up, Wickstead wove the two threads together, reiterating the precise lines and sleek, elegant femininity you might usually associate with her, while also exploring her more provocative, tomboyish side with subtlety. It was “about following my nose and seeing where that takes me,” she said at a preview.
As is often the case, Wickstead’s starting point was a specific muse: here, Gisèle Freund, the German photographer who spent decades in Paris capturing the intellectual glitterati who either lived in or passed through the city—Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo—with a particular interest in how they worked, whether expressed through their studios, homes, or clothing. Freund was also a pioneer in the world of photojournalism, bringing modern color-photography technology to South America for the first time in the late 1930s. Hence the setting for Wickstead’s show, the hallowed halls of the Royal Geographical Society, where models wove their way around enormous explorers’ globes. “Gisèle used to say that when she would take a photograph, she could feel their souls,” Wickstead mentioned. “She had this profound relationship with her subjects, and so in this collection, I’ve tried to do the same.”
One particular subject—and image—that remained front of mind for Wickstead while designing the collection was a photograph of de Beauvoir, reclining on her sofa surrounded by papers, in a peach silk shirt with a tie and matching skirt in what appears to be denim. It was this contrast that gave the designer her starting point, with riffs on the classic men’s tie that were looped under and back into the waistband, expanded into gowns with a single sheet of fabric across the chest and then tucked into an asymmetric waistline and a skirt with diagonal pleats swishing underneath.
Slowly, bolder splashes of color—baby blue, sugary pastel pink, blazing green—began to creep in, as did a series of rhythmic block prints that gently nodded to mid-century Argentine design and gorgeous floral prints with a painterly bleed applied. There were gloves and headpieces by Laura Cathcart covered with glittering floral embellishments; boyish knit polo tops with contrasting black fringing on the collar; some seriously smart tailoring; and a new summer-ready riff on Wickstead’s Grenson loafers with their oversized tassels from last season, here reinterpreted as a sandal. It was eclectic but apt for the rich tapestry of characters you see while scrolling through Freund’s photos. “All of a sudden, I felt like I had created this little bit of a girl gang,” Wickstead said of putting the collection together. “I really honed in on the contrast between the public personas of the women that she photographed versus who they were at home.”
As always, there was a different kind of girl gang Wickstead was thinking about too: the coterie of creative women who surround her and serve as her most loyal clients, many of whom have appeared in her look books over the years. Spending time with Wickstead herself, it’s not hard to see why so many powerful women have been charmed by her and brought closer into her orbit—she’s a natural conversationalist with the personality trait all the best designers have: a boundless curiosity. In turn, it could be why she relates to an explorer like Freund, who found her greatest inspiration in other people, then used her lens to go deeper under the skin of her subjects. It’s always a lot of fun to spend time in Wickstead’s world, but don’t underestimate the intellectual rigor of her approach to design. “What I loved most about Gisèle was that she believed photography was suited to a female mentality,” said Wickstead. “She believed that women were excellent observers, which made them better photographers.” It’s that very same point of view that helps lend Wickstead’s work its magic.
