4 5 How the London Fashion Uprising

A model poses on HOW THE LONDON FASHION UPRISING HAPPENED the catwalk wearing clothes by student designer Christopher Fashion is always a its intricacies, through Kane during the reflection of its time and the first-hand accounts of Central St. Martins of the individuals who the individuals within College of Art & Design show at channel it. It has plenty this book. The shortcut London’s Fashion Week, to say about what we’re collective answer to it, 18 February 2006. Kane won the best getting up to, what we though, is simple. In show award. want to escape to and what the broadest of terms, we’re hiding from. So how London’s designers does this strong wave of concocted the perfect design – which came both antidote to the hideously from graduates barely out dark times – right in of university and from the middle of what established brands that threatened to be the most rebooted themselves – desperate crash since illustrate all of these the 1930s. Together, they things? came up with doom-busting stylistic escapism in It is notoriously hard the form of colourful, to freeze fashion long exuberant, witty and, in enough to take stock of many cases, beautifully what’s happening – it’s a made clothes. While the medium that contains so fashion establishment many different characters, was paralysed, quaking so many moving parts, and in fear of taking risks rushes forward in such or of causing offence by a blur that it rarely being too showy, London’s bothers to look in the designers ran in exactly always clad in black). The young designers who rear-view mirror. But the opposite direction. This new cohort – kids turned up next rebelled what is common to all They acted as individuals, in the Nineties, young with their professionalism. the people in this book together. Their answer to adults in the 2000s – They didn’t identify with is one extraordinary and the general miserableness rose up with a completely their immediate elders bizarre fact. They are all confronting their different consciousness. – and frankly, they had part of a London fashion generation was an all- They grew up loving Kylie even harsher realities phenomenon that put on its filters-off experimentation Minogue, Britney Spears to fight against. Theirs creative and commercial with print, colour, showing and The Spice Girls – was a revolt born of growth-spurt at the very off and dressing up. or, in the case of Erdem self-reliant optimism: a worst of times, precisely Moralioğlu and Christopher backlash against the anti- when financial markets They were a new breed. Kane, watching TV business attitude that had were crashing, and a pall (Merchant Ivory in Erdem’s gone before. of economic depression ‘I suppose it’s quite case, in Toronto; Hammer was falling over the uncool. I rebel with Horror in Kane’s case, in But it always takes far world. Time and again, lace and tulle.’ Scotland). Their vividly more than a fresh sense of foreign fashion observers Erdem Moralioğlu, US cheerful, multicoloured style and youthful hopes stand back and look at Vogue, February 2007 uprising overthrew to turn fashion enthusiasm London fashion, with its everything that observers in to something real. energy, confidence, and Previous British had come to expect from Previous generations of its knitted-together generations of young ‘British’ fashion from London fashion designers organization, and ask: how designers had rebelled punk onwards – underground in the early Eighties was that possible? through punk, amateurish extremism, shock-theatrics and the late Nineties had aggro-chic and a general and, ultimately, a tedious risen and crashed, or That is the mystery that attitude of hackles-raised inability to deliver joined a steady exodus can be unravelled, in all non-cooperation (and 4 5 their collections. to show or take jobs in Looking up at the imposing Georgian frontage of number – boom!’, he exclaims. ‘I don’t like fashionable 30 Welbeck Street, you might feel as if you’re about interior decorators!’ to go in to see a senior specialist. That’s quite true, in a way. Two turnings west of Harley Street, To trace the Russian connection, it turns out that right in the midst of the area which has long been we’d have to go back to one Count Vorontsov of Russia, occupied by the British medical establishment, lies who was here in 1826 – it’s the sort of link which the practice of the most distinguished expert in his appeals to an imagination which roams freely through field – Mr Manolo Blahnik, CBE. history, art, movies and cultures of every place and decade. Certain other glittering figures pass through As it happens, the world’s top expert in the here these days, though. Looking at the balcony that beautification of feet, famously an Anglophile, polymath faces Welbeck Street, he remarks, ‘Oh! There was a and gentleman, is also someone who wears a white lab singer who came here – she stepped out there and blew coat at work. As he descends into his elegant first- kisses to the builders opposite! They were shrieking floor showroom, he’s fresh from performing surgical her name!’ He’s far too discreet to mention, of adjustment to the cut of a prototype on the floor course, that it was Rihanna, who came to him for a above. Hastily plucking off a pair of white cotton limited edition, sparkle-embroidered collaboration, gloves, he cries, ‘Please excuse me! I’ve been upstairs Denim Desserts, in early 2016. working! This, you see, is what I have worn every single day to work; these Italian factory things’. On the next floor up, in the production office, every surface is lined with works in progress. Manolo roams Manolo Blahnik has never stopped applying his desks, picking up sample after sample, extemporizing fastidious hands to drawing, carving heels and on how they came to him. There’s a gilded snakeskin refining lasts since he started his shoe collection flat with a curl cut into its front. ‘Handmade in London in 1971. That he became a shoe designer python! Like a squiggle, or a question mark.’ A pair at all is something he credits to Diana Vreeland: of delicate black suede summer sandals concocted ‘Do extremities!’ she told him. His is a mind which from zigzaggy straps are ‘like eyelashes!’. While races across time and cultures, art history and some luscious green textured high heels have him reminiscences, his conversation a glamorous tornado rhapsodizing about ‘prickly pears’. How do all these of high-energy chat, self-deprecating anecdote and incredible, elusive ideas keep tumbling out of him? glorious overstatement. The fact that he’s relocated ‘Suddenly I draw it!’ He shrugs. Developing the heels his studio to this West End establishment after comes next. ‘I sculpt them in wood.’ twenty-five years on Old Church Street, followed by Kings Road and Sydney Street in Chelsea, is a move he The inside of the lift is lined with some of the says that was occasioned not so much by choice, as by hundreds of fluid pen-and-ink drawings that have flown the landlord’s redevelopment plans. ‘I was in the same from his sketch pad over the decades. As it goes up, little room for twenty-five years up there in Chelsea, heading towards his attic studio, he thinks over the and the house in King’s Road; then we moved to Sydney question of how many people now work here, from the Street – and here we are now!’ basement to the top floor. ‘I think there are about forty people,’ he marvels. It’s marked a definite change of scenery from what was an arty, haute bohemian area, but today’s new Down there, it’s like the Titanic of horror! You premises have all the grandeur of a ‘house’ of fashion hear ‘click, click, click’ on the computers there. that you’d be more likely to find in Paris. ‘I think They don’t speak to each other very much. In my it was the Russian Embassy here – something like time, it was screams – screams! Can you hear the that,’ he remarks. ‘We bought it from some kind of accountants in there? [He whispers, passing a closed pop stars!’ He walks to the back window. ‘See? Just door]. No! And in there, they say it is… Logistics? Top, Caption text there, that little dome is an Orthodox church, quite to be positioned here. charming!’ His whirlwind tour of the house begins in Above, Caption text That Manolo Blahnik can be so successful today, a to be positioned here. the elegant hush of his double-fronted drawing room household name, and such a joyously creative force on the first floor, surrounded by fur-trimmed booties, in the world of fashion – and yet still doesn’t need satin slippers with sparkling buckles, and myriads to be perfectly conversant with the nuts and bolts of Manolo ‘pumps’ that are perched in alcoves and on of trading to the world – is not just down to his antique furniture beneath a huge Regency chandelier. phenomenal, quicksilver creativity or his technical ‘I designed the carpets myself: a squiggle, and MANOLO BLAHNIK / 43 44 finesse. Like so many fashion businesses that have School, they drank in their education, went to life- drawing classes at Glasgow School of Art, and played at fashion at home from the time Tammy was thirteen, and Christopher was eight. They spent hours after school making clothes and textiles on the sitting room floor, avidly watching Jeanne Beker’s ‘Fashion STELLA Television’ shows via their father’s new satellite dish – and naughtily staying up watching rented horror videos, and late night TV serials when their Auntie Sandra baby-sat.

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