Before we settled in for this season’s triple-bill Fashion East runway show, there were two presentations and one open bar to enjoy. The first presentation was from newcomer Positive Energy Flows Again by footwear designer Kitty Shukman. The models sat in or around a gnarled model tree as chakra bass hummed. Some wore prosthetic angel wings or raised crucifix and wing temporary body augmentations. There was a healer in the room to ensure our energy stayed cleansed.
This was Shukman’s way of shaping a contextual terrain upon which she wanted her footwear to tread. That was a slide presented in six colorways of EVA called the Infinity, which corkscrewed around the foot in an attractively WTF sculptural spiral. The highly impressive and technically challenging 3D yin-yang shoe design was evidently, as Shukman said afterward, in part the product of her spiritual practice.
Upstairs and past the Bistrotheque’s heaving bar stood a happily chatting line of models wearing pieces by Sosskyn, which was represented here for the second time. Artist Samara Scott and curator Tayah Leigh Barrs created this venture together from their studio in Dover. A standout detail: One of the upcycled garments that Scott had used as a canvas for her intensely patterned reliefs in latex and other materials was a moth-eaten Loro Piana knit that had been donated by her grandmother. You could imagine Scott in the studio adding layers of texture and pattern to her wearable surfaces with as much glee and passion as she exhibited while relating that process of making.
It took a while to clear the bar, but the benches eventually filled. This was Olly Shinder’s third and final appearance on the Fashion East roster, and he signed off by showing his first-ever womenswear looks. He’d designed them over the summer, an experience of which he said: “I think it made me realize that the girl is no different from the guy.” That’s because the rules that Shinder sees and subverts are less related to gender differences than they are to an indifference to all facets of individuality that forms of uniform work to exert. By both amping up and camping up the strictures of uniform, he hands the authority of self-image back to the wearer, alongside the power to evoke archetypes of sexual fantasy. As for the future, he said: “I just want to try and have fun and make the best work that I can.”
When Jebi Labembika helped cast Cameron Williams’s graduation show back in 2020, they got on so well that they decided to work together long-term under the label Nuba. For their debut here tonight, the pair presented a collection of shadowy, finely draped, and tailored pieces whose shapes evoked examples of spontaneous elegance that had inspired them on the streets of their respective home patches of Woolwich and Brixton. Tension, stimulation, and integration all played against one another in ways that were simultaneously subtle and overt. “It’s about assimilation,” said Labembika of the collection, which was molded by forces both intergenerational and multicultural. “And it’s about the story of a boy who’s trying to achieve his maturity,” added Williams.
Last up was Loutre by Pia Schiele, a self-taught designer who was born in Germany and has been a Londoner for a decade. As with Nuba, the designer’s experience of this city worked as a protagonist in the collection. Schiele mixed pieces of adapted and upcycled vintage (the slouchy Prince of Wales check shooting coat stood out), refabrications (including some finely patched mixed knits), and items that were newly fashioned. There was sometimes a Westwood-y flavor to this beta-stage Loutre demimonde, but never overpoweringly so. A gray velvet zip-up with Westernwear-ish crystal detailing and a faux-fur-trimmed waistline exemplified an approach that worked through the creation of unexpected and irreverent adjacencies: layering elements from different architectures on the same block. That was very London.
