“Look where we are—in the Tate gallery, this incredible building, which still has pock marks from the bombing in World War II,” said Christopher Kane. “It’s part of being British that we pull through.” The title of his collection was Make Do and Mend, also the name of a 1940s British government pamphlet of how-to tips for women about adapting their clothes to last longer in times of rationing. As always, women especially cared about keeping up their appearances, even at a time when walking out of their homes meant taking on the risk that they might never come back again. As we do today.
That said, of course, Christopher Kane didn’t have anything like a ’40s collection in mind. The recycling here had to do with trawling through his own past, both as a kid in the small Scottish town of Newarthill and as a designer who today celebrates his 10 year anniversary of showing in London Fashion Week. He pointed out a coat printed with souvenir Polaroids and backstage shots as his “patchwork of memories,” a tag that could be a subtitle for this collection as a whole. But despite this nostalgic framing, it was hardly a sentimental, loving-hands-at-home character that Kane put on the runway. With her greasy hair and her feet jammed in Crocs—surely the least redeemable of footwear as far as fashion sees it—she was a definite oddball, perhaps touched with Catholic guilt but, as Kane put it, also “radical, sexy, a real predator.”
Comments