Well, that was a blast. For anyone whose energy levels were flagging on the final day of London Fashion Week, Conner Ives came through with a joyous, neon-drenched mood booster. The show kicked off with the viral 20-year-old rapper Cortisa Star strutting through the Saatchi Yates gallery in St. James’s, wearing a sherbet orange rugby top with a slinky skirt upcycled from a vintage Chinese silk, paired with a dangly tasseled micro bag swinging by a string from her wrist and an enormous pair of visor-like orange sunglasses. (All this to a floor-rattling soundtrack of Uffie’s “Pop the Glock.”) The beaming smiles of the London It girls sitting front row in their Ives bias-cut dresses, tapping their strappy heels to the beat, said it all.
At first, you might ascribe the show’s bold, upbeat energy—stark strip lighting; acid-laced colors; a soundtrack of helter-skelter mash-ups from Nelly Furtado to an acappella rendition of Robyn’s “Dancing on my Own”—to the fact that Ives has had the biggest year of his career. At the end of his show last February, Ives stepped out in his “Protect the Dolls” T-shirt that quickly went viral, eventually being worn by everyone from Pedro Pascal to Tilda Swinton. (All proceeds from the shirt are donated to Trans Lifeline, raising $600,000 so far for the charity.)
“It’s been a transformative six months,” Ives said before the show, in something of an understatement. When he’s told there’s a certain irony to a designer who has always woven pop culture references into his clothes creating a piece that itself becomes a part of pop culture, Ives replied, laughing, by quoting Lady Gaga: “Suddenly the Koons is me.” What Ives didn’t want, however, was for that to be the beginning and the end of his support of the trans community. He recently signed a deal with Mac to partner on a Viva Glam lipstick coming later this year, which will also see all proceeds donated to trans charities; it turns out those dinky tasseled bags were actually made from upcycled piano shawls and designed to carry a single lipstick capsule. And though he’s always cast a far higher quota of trans models in his shows than most, this time around, the vast majority of the cast were trans or gender nonconforming. “Casting is always a big story for us, but I really wanted to speak to what I said with my chest last season,” he said. With every day seeming to bring more depressing headlines about the reversals on trans rights being made on both sides of the pond, it was genuinely affecting to witness.
Yet while Ives spoke eloquently about his disappointment with the way the world is moving, he also wanted to let the casting—and the clothes—do the talking. “Here I am talking about a fashion collection when it feels like the world is crumbling around us, but it echoes what I was saying last season—that I’m going to speak to this in the way that I know how and do something that I feel proud of, even if that does not take away the terror that my friends are facing on a daily basis,” he added.
So, then, to the fashion. The starting point, Ives explained, was a meditation on the new wave of pop stars who have risen in the past year or so, and the parallels he sees with the pop boom he grew up with in the late 2000s and early 2010s. “I almost see pop music as a kind of recession indicator,” he said. “We’re living in a really great time for pop music right now, and it reminds me of being a kid and being introduced to Lady Gaga during the financial crisis.” Where last season, with its Bob Fosse overtones, offered a sense of escape to the glitz of the 1970s, this time around, Ives wanted to root everything firmly in contemporary references. “I’m a bit of a magpie, so it forced me to work in a different way,” he said. “I feel like we’re in a moment of fatigue and reference fatigue, so I tried to remove myself from that a little.”
The guiding principle for Ives was creating clothes that offered a sense of “protection.” In some cases, that was literal, such as the final look of a swishy hooded chainmail dress worn over a pair of neon knickers, or a dress covered with amulet-like mother-of-pearl paillettes that clacked down the runway. A fabulous bias-cut gown in a shocking pink silk crepe was topped with a brown chiffon overlay, and paired with the faded feathers Ives plucked from an early 20th-century burlesque fan, then placed around the model’s neck like an elegant bird with its hackles raised. And by (mostly) taking the game of pop culture Guess Who? out of the equation, he let the pieces shine in their own right. An especially brilliant spark of design wizardry came in the penultimate look, which was slathered in leather sequins Ives laser cut from discarded jackets, then hand-embroidered onto silk chiffon over the course of six weeks.
Ives being Ives, there were still a few pop culture nods thrown in for good measure: a handful of references bubbled up over the course of our conversation, including everything from the gold shorts worn by Kylie Minogue in the “Spinning Around” video to Lady Gaga in neon Marc Jacobs on the cover of V Magazine in 2009, to the bright colors and lingerie details of Dara Allen’s styling of Addison Rae. “Pop music will never be low brow,” Ives said with a wink, quoting a well-known statement made by Gaga during one of her early The Fame-era performances.
This collection may not have been escapist in the sense that last season’s retro spectacle was, but it was hard not to leave the show feeling optimistic, despite it all. The whoops and cheers and general sense of bonhomie from the audience as they spotted friends walking the runway was infectious. As Ives himself put it: “The only way out is through.”
