London Fashion Week Report: “We Are Not ‘Little Britain’”

It’s a cliché that dark economic times always bring out the best in London, but there’s a truth to it. Mainly because it’s the prime London designer rule

that you must be yourself, and when the economic chips are down, you just go stronger and louder—as Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, and Alexander McQueen all did. Multiculturalism is an equal part of London’s creative superpower as a fashion city as its individualism. You just can’t make trends out of that (quiet luxury is a baffling concept), but we did see JW Anderson come out with total clarity, almost a brutishly brilliant youth-driven skit on old timer Britishness, and Erdem, passionately focusing on everything he believes in with his decoratively undone tribute to Maria Callas. There’s zero similarity between those two—neither of whom have anything in common with Paolo Carzana, the young gently poetic Welsh firebrand—except that, 20 years ago, both Erdem and Jonathan Anderson also started up, pretty much penniless, fueled like Carzana is today, by hope and vision.

I couldn’t get to everything, but I want to make one last important point. If you scroll through Vogue Runway’s coverage, you’ll see collections by 17 independent women designers, from Emilia Wickstead to Dilara Findikoglu, Simone Rocha to Dimitra Di Petsa, Sinead O’Dwyer to Molly Goddard, Ahluwalia to Tolu Coker, Roksanda Ilincic to Robyn Lynch, and Masha Popova to Kazna Asker. Something else about what that list means to London: These designers represent their connections with Greece, Turkey, Ireland, China, Serbia, Nigeria, India, Ukraine, and many more countries. You don’t have to look very far to know that London’s fashion energy thrives because of the very fact we’re not Little Britain.—Sarah Mower