Charlie Constantinou typically takes an iterative approach to his craft, sowing the seeds of one collection within the soils of another. This season, however, he felt compelled to clear the table, to start over from scratch. “Apart from some accessories, we don t have any carryover whatsoever,” he said in a collection preview. “I always have the habit of looking back on the previous seasons, but with this, we wanted to further develop and continue on this path of growth.”
The result was Constantinou’s duskiest collection to date: a noteworthy thing for a designer commonly associated with lurid, borderline lysergic dye treatments on textural, technically innovative knits—which, by the way, hardly featured either. An allegory for the passage of night into day, the collection opened firmly in the latter, with waist skimming jersey dresses and gorpy trousers with culotte overlays in shadowy grays, navys and browns. Reinforcing the collection’s moodiness was a medieval air that filtered down into jaunty mesh hoods on woven dresses, Little Red Riding hood capes, and jutting, armored shoulder constructions that had a shogun-era resonance to them.
In a season where London’s designers seem to have unanimously plumped for channeling notions of lightness and airiness, Constantinou’s sombre proposal felt fresh—like “a very cold spring day,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to channel with the color story.” That may seem a wantonly gloomy approach to take when the climate in England is so bleak (literally and figuratively), but there was a poetic optimism to be found here. It is, after all, always darkest before the dawn; spring’s buds only appear again after the most bitter of chills.
