Three successful British designers, Nicole Farhi, Margaret Howell and Betty Jackson, brought a new sobriety to their winter collections yesterday with a common palette of black, grey and navy, writes Deirdre McQuillan, Fashion Editor, in London
The reinforcement or endorsement of black as a key colour for the coming season coincides with changing proportions and more sculpted silhouettes. Women want to wear black. Women designers know that.
At Nicole Farhi's show in the Royal Opera House, she recycled trench coats and parkas in evening wear fabrics like black taffeta, teaming everything with ribbed knit leggings and defining the waist with slim belts. Standout items in her show were a shapely flared grey tweed coat, a simple cashmere tunic and a little black dress studded with silver sequins and veiled with black chiffon.
There may have been nothing really new or particularly creative in Farhi's show, but at Betty Jackson, models, looking like early Puritans, strode out in black patent ankle boots, in black pinafores and long monastic skirts under belted tunics.
It was a powerful collection in which Jackson's skill expressed itself in her use of black fabrics of every texture and type from shiny moiré silk to black broderie anglaise and patent leather.
Tent coats in banana yellow mohair and huge orange cable knits livened up this dark parade, though her painterly colour sense really came to the fore in a flirty scalloped dress in overlapping layers of plum, mustard and pink organza.
Margaret Howell's style, low-key and sophisticated, is notable for a certain boyish femininity expressed by slimline trousers, neat knit vests and chic granddad shirts worn with mannish brogues.
Like the others, her parkas were in black too, but cocky little airforce hats gave a leather military style coat or a Donegal tweed jacket a tough chic severity in tune with the season. London fashion week closes tomorrow when US designer Marc Jacobs shows his Marc diffusion line in Claridges to celebrate the opening of his new store in Mayfair.