The capital’s fashion culture was overshadowed by its rivals thirty years ago. Now, a new exhibition chronicles the city’s nightlife-inspired renaissance and includes items worn by Bjork and Sam Smith.What does London posses that Manhattan, Paris, and Milan didn’t ?
The new exhibition at the Museum of Design attributes much of the popularity of British design to the dynamic nightlife scene of the 1990s in London. Many fashion cities may be renowned for their immaculate ateliers, where crews in immaculate white lab coats discreetly weave, but this is not the case in London.
30 Years of London, Rebel Nearly 100 pieces from 300 designers are showcased in fashion, with everything from Rihanna’s tulle gown to Sam Smith’s inflatable latex outfit. The exhibition “aims to respond to the query that that I’ve always asked, which is: ‘Why are always so many brilliant young designers in Britain?'” according to guest curator and fashion critic for Vogue Sarah Mower.
Visitors can dance in one space while being surrounded by nightlife-inspired clothes and throbbing music and flashing lights. We realized that the fashion industry was heavily influenced by club evenings, so we thought it needed its own segment, explains Mower. The neon bandage gown from Christopher Kane’s debut collection from 2006, which inspired Donatella Versace to engage Kane for work on her line Versus, is on display.
The Soho sex shops are also referenced in a latex bodysuit by Gareth Pugh that is adorned with enormous spheres, and the historic London clubs Blitz, Kinky Gerlinky, and Boombox are honored in a floor-length gown by Charles Jeffrey Loverboy from his 2018 collection.
Britain was through a recession thirty years ago, and the London Fashion Week was suffering as a result. Editors and stylist were hesitant about going to the capital because star names like Vivienne Westwood had moved to Paris and there were only 14 name on the London agenda.
Bums on chairs mattered back then since there was no social media, according to Mower. British Fashion Council looked for advantages London may have over New York, Paris, and Milan. When they realized it was youth culture, a lighting went off.
With the goal of fostering young talent, the British Fashion Council established the NewGen initiative, which has since assisted other designers in launching their careers.
At the Ritz hotel, the then-unknown Lee Alexander McQueen made his debut with the first show by a NewGen designer.
The earliest collection won’t be on display at this exhibition, though. Instead, a room plays a recording of Simon Ungless, a fellow designer and his former housemate, reminiscing about how it was lost soon after the exhibition at the Ritz. After packing the collection into trash bags, the pair went to their preferred club. They placed the bags under a trash because they couldn’t afford the fees for the cloakroom. When they returned later to fetch their luggage, they were no longer there. There is no known history of the collection.
Another space celebrates local and foreign designers who refined their craft in London. The “swan” dress by Marjan Pejoski that Björk wore to the 2001 Oscar will be on exhibit for the very first time in Britain. Pejoski, who was raised in North Macedonia, relocated to London to attend Central Saint Martins to study womenswear. Another standout is a pair of perfectly fitted blue trousers from Grace Wales Bonner, who investigates black identity & male sexuality with her namesake label. The outfit pays homage to the workmanship of both east and west Africa as well as the Caribbean. A timeline detailing the current challenges faced by art educational institutions and pupils is displayed on one wall of the exhibition.
Education was free in 1993. Tuition fees were implemented five years later during Tony Blair’s leadership, and Brexit is still deterring many students from the EU from applying today. Recently, Rishi Sunak announced initiatives to limit enrollment in “low-value” university degrees.
The display is anything from negative, though. It traces how British designers resisted conventional wisdom and sparked change in a manner consistent with the term Rebel. The tabloids initially mocked a pair of ruffled shorts from Jonathan Anderson’s 2013 menswear collection along with the designer’s view on gender flexibility. A few months later, Anderson was appointed creative director of the LVMH-owned company Loewe, which is where he is credited with turning it into a multimillion-pound fashion company that generates record-high amounts of sales.