The Portuguese designers Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida breezed back in to air their spring collection at their old London stamping ground. Their relocation to Porto, forced on by the pandemic, has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for their brand’s development. It meant forging stronger bonds with Portugal’s clothing manufacturing industry—and giving themselves breathing space to mature creatively.
So, back for London fashion week, they unfurled a surprise —long floaty, draped voile dresses fluttering with asymmetric, spiraling layers, and flying caped shoulder-lines. “I think that the sense is that whatever we were doing, there was always a kind of heaviness to it,” said Marques. “This time it’s more a scarf-y lightness and flowers.”
Community-building has always been at the heart of the Marques’Almeida brand, and there’s a sense that they and their customers have grown up together. In 2018 they showed a landmark collection in an open-air graffiti-spattered derelict East London railway alley. Their M’A girls (as they called their gang) looked resplendent, rocking their heady mixes of baroque biker jackets, jeans, feathers, and neo-grunge furbelows with total conviction. It was bright daylight, but you imagined they could easily be filing out from an all-night rave round the corner.
Seven years on, it’s become more a case of M’A family-extension. Their collection consciously embraces women of many generations (mothers, daughters, sisters, and a baby) and extends a generosity of shape and volume that does away with size discrimination. In doing that, they swept away the tailoring and the rawer elements that used to characterize their shows, replacing them with their new angles on sophisticated-but-cool event, dinner, and party dressing.
Appropriately enough, their show location was in a very different part of East London—high up in a financial district City skyscraper in a space soon to become a Gordon Ramsay restaurant. A full menu of Marques’Almeida was served: stately duchesse gowns with giant shoulder bows, variations on slip dresses (maybe parsed as tops floating over signature boyfriend jeans in a matching color), botanical water-color prints, and pink-rose jacquards. Of course you could still see their bread-and-butter too; their denim peplum tops and newly-cut variants of their signature Marques’Almeida boyfriend jeans were on parade, present and correct.
