London Fashion Week closed Tuesday with a stellar presentation from bag designer Anya Hindmarch in one of the Royal Horticultural Halls in Victoria.
Using a giant origami-style set with angled mirrors and strobe lighting to create kaleidoscopic effects, it was a masterstroke in how to turn an accessories fashion show into an exciting event.
The designer, who founded her luxury brand nearly 30 years ago is known for her smiley bags, cheeky stickers and tassels and for incorporating mundane everyday graphics like road signage in witty and luxurious ways. With this collection, she played with pattern and stripe in colours like grey, red and blue not only on bags and backpacks, but on boots, scarves and bodysuits, for a slick and stylish geometric collection that is bound to be a winner.
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Zany stripes and prints played a large part in the summer collections in London where the overall look was one of feminine cool with all its reworked associations and trappings like frills, lace, ruffles and flounces, but with serious modern firepower.
It showed, for instance, in collections from Peter Pilotto with his colourful tiered lace dresses, in Erdem's Little House on the Prairie flyaway organzas and flower embroideries to Roksanda Ilincic's bell sleeves and frayed silk numbers. Flat shoes, kimono style jackets and tailoring that was light rather than structured kept the frivolity firmly in check. Only a few collections like Hunter, with cute eyelet coats and parkas, featured tough weather wear.
London Fashion Week is to continue in the Brewer Street car park in Soho for the next two years and Gareth Pugh’s homage to the neighbourhood’s original spirit and reference to the current showdown between drag queens and developers was a brilliantly executed manifesto that highlighted the turf wars between creativity and commerce.
On a catwalk lined with thousands of pennies models stalked out in disco stripes, fluffy marabou coats and copper sequinned jackets, their legs in latex, their hair spiky wigs — bad girls, said the designer, ready for battle.
It was the show of the season.
