Madonna At Joseph! Harry Styles At House Of Holland! Celebrating 40 Years Of London’s Frow
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Every fashion editor has their first frow memory. The time they saw a serious A-lister surrounded by flustered fashion PRs and flashing camera bulbs escorted to her seat. The moment they saw a junior member of a magazine plonking themselves with a don’t-come-at-me pout in (sharp intake of breath!) a more senior seating allocation. The instance said assistant was then asked to reposition herself a row (or several!) back, due to the sudden presence of, and lack of seating for, the aforementioned A-lister. There’s the shuffling and bustling when bench seating is too narrow, the hustling when a guest is unhappy with her seat (no one wants to be sat behind a roving videographer), the tutting when a selfie stick blocks the view of the catwalk.
My first memory of the frow was to save a seat. As an intern at Fashion East in 2011, I was required to sit in the bench space allocated for a certain Anna Wintour, in case of unforeseen front-row congestion. As a 21-year-old, who’d spent her teenage years scrolling Vogue Runway, I couldn’t believe I was sitting so close to a real London Fashion Week catwalk, even if I was simply part of a seat-saving strategy.
There’s a certain sense of fashion froideur on the frow today. The cliché of sullen-looking fashion editors aside, today guests (or rare interlopers) are identified by images on iPads and celebrities are cautious of being captured at their worst angles. But what of the first official London Fashion Week frow in 1984, which took place in an era without iPhones, social media or existential algorithmic unease? Forty years ago, LFW’s first location was the Commonwealth Institute’s car park on Kensington High Street, and the vast exhibition venue, Kensington Olympia, also played host to the event throughout the ’80s. The woman responsible for securing such venues was Lynne Franks – the famed fashion PR who also represented Katharine Hamnett, Wendy Dagworthy, Jasper Conran, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood and BodyMap – and is believed to have been the inspiration for the Bolly-swigging Edina Monsoon in Absolutely Fabulous.
“There was always a front row for the main fashion buyers and top journalists, and then you’d fit celebrities in between,” says Franks. Forget brand ambassadors and sponsored spots on the frow, this was an era when music icons flocked to the runways of their favourite labels simply for the love of the clothes. All exits and entrances were flanked by photographers. “These were the years of Boy George, Spandau Ballet and Bananarama, and even Madonna at a Joseph show, which was a great thrill,” Franks says. Her most difficult clients? “I’d always have to extract Italian buyers who pretended they couldn’t speak English from the front row!”
“All of the designers had their own different celebrity followers,” Franks adds. Wendy Dagworthy designed for Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, BodyMap worked with renowned Scottish choreographer and recent JW Anderson collaborator, Michael Clark, and Boy George sauntered down the brand’s catwalk in 1985. “BodyMap had transvestites, grannies and kids in their shows. Katharine Hamnett had African drummers, Tibetan monks, my children and her children… the shows were a lot more entertaining and a lot less serious,” Franks says. “I shouldn’t just keep repeating the word fun, but it was really just enormous fun!”
Since its inception, London Fashion Week has been associated with an eccentricity and grassroots grit that still pervades today. Franks concurs.“The shows then came out of the streets, the clubs, the art colleges,” she says. “We were using live DJs, it was like a party.”
