The best of London Fashion Week Spring 2024 collections – CNA Luxury Feedzy

London Fashion Week Spring 2024, which started last weekend, coincided with the British royal family’s commemoration of the first anniversary of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and the first year of King Charles’ reign. The timing created the consciousness that England was passing from its golden era into an uncertain future. The era of Great Britain has sailed into the sunset of history, and in its place, ongoing cost of living crisis, rampant inflation and public health service is in deterioration. There’s also a group of people divided on the leadership of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Dishy Rishi, some called him). It says something when a prime minister is known more for his Prada suits than for his policies.

London Fashion Week (LFW) has always offered a dose of hectic creativity, and the royalty of fashion design. The first London Fashion Week began in 1984 (it was the youngest among the Big Four in fashion weeks: New York, Milan, Paris, London), launching the late Vivienne Westwood as the queen of punk, and featured the debut of the legendary John Galliano (with his precocious first collection, based on the French Revolution, Les Incroyables).

Other notable alumni such as Sir Paul Smith, Alexander McQueen, and Stella McCartney stopped showing in London ages ago. Noughties darlings Hussein Chalayan, Julien Macdonald, Matthew Williamson, and Christopher Kane have exited the business entirely, and the queens of Cool Britannia have simply faded from fashion – Katharine Hamnett, Betty Jackson, Jasper Conran, Zandra Rhodes, Rifat Ozbek, Bruce Oldfield, where art thou?

VOGUE WORLD LONDON

The red-carpet extravaganza showcased multicultural London style in all its glory: Tongue-in-cheek rebellion, outrageous displays and endearing naffness – with none of that drag-race quality that haunts the Met Gala. The Queen of fashion Anna Wintour (global chief content officer for Conde Nast) reigned in a gold coat, flanked by her courtiers, the Ghana-born Edward Enninful, global creative and cultural advisor of Vogue, and the tauter-than-a-dowager’s-facelift film director Baz Luhrman. Enninful is like Andre Leon Talley 2.0, Wintour’s then lieutenant and BFF, the bees’ knees until he wasn’t. Luhrman is a firm Wintour favourite, and inseparable from the be-bobbed one.

In the trio’s wake came real royalty in the sister act of Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. Beatrice arrived in a floral Richard Quinn dress accessorised with her dashing husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi. Eugenie wore Fendi. Emma, Marchioness of Bath sizzled in silver, while Lady Victoria Hervey cantered in a caped gown. The British beauty entrepreneur Charlotte Tilbury came dressed as Dame Barbie. Hollywood royalty included Kate Winslet, Simone Ashley, Idris Elba, and Sam Mendes, with Rita Ora, who dazzled in an Alaia dress. Sienna Miller followed the fashion for flashing her pregnancy, in a bundle of Schiaparelli pleats ‒ quite the showstopper ‒ and managed to exude raffish charm.

BURBERRY

The iconic London tube sign for Bond Street station was renamed Burberry Street and retinted, a greasy spoon was renamed and re-styled as a Burberry pub, in a controversial marketing blitz for creative director Daniel Lee’s second outing for Burberry. Brand-clarity was the pitch of this crisply edited show, which gave us beautiful re-conceptualisations of the Burberry trench coat, with silhouettes for modern life, asymmetric lapels and a pronounced epaulette adding interest to womenswear and menswear. Post-maximalist and unaffected, double-breasted two-piece suits saluted London’s Savile Row. Lee implanted Burberry signifiers in not understated ways, with a blown-up Burberry Prorsum knight logo, a chunky Burberry knight belt buckle, a bourgeois lady-scarf print (like the kind Queen Elizabeth wore on a sunny day in Sandringham), a pattern of chains, whirled on dresses, shirts and coats. In the narrow coats, the lyrical layering, the perfect pants, bold florals and chicly-undone shirts, Lee paid tribute to the golden age of Burberry – the house-defining designs of Christopher Bailey, who helmed Burberry from 2001 to 2018.

Between Loewe and the eponymous JW Anderson label, Jonathan Anderson has garnered a reputation as perhaps the most irreverent, talented, and thought-provoking designer working in fashion today. In his protean creativity, Anderson is like John Galliano as a young man, a modern and minimalist Alexander McQueen. His lifework seems to take every beloved fashion item and explore it to its last pixel, in all dimensions, shapes and form and then to reassemble it, whittled of all the extraneous, to arrive at the pure essence of the thing. The results seem almost logical: These were clothes, in principle, but also ideas – the platonic ideal of a hoodie, a crochet dress, moccasin. A trench coat that is like a poem about a rainy day in Yorkshire. A moulded grey hoodie and shorts – in a pinched-and-puckered clay was a child’s understanding of what a hoodie and shorts are – in its naive and direct approach, shorn of marketing imagery, styling, media interpretation, cliches, we arrived at the shiny soul of the thing.

The 33-year-old London-born Richard Quinn honed his skills at Christian Dior and Savile Row before establishing his eponymous label in 2017. The Dior influence is exquisitely present in this collection, in ethereal, soigne gowns with ultrafine embroidery of tiny flowers, delicate embellishments, lashings of lace, ruffles and ribbons. The segment of the market this serves is in custom eveningwear – for a stately debutante of the 1950s. The lovingly made clothes unfortunately seem haunted by the recent collections of Balenciaga and Valentino and have the embalmed, deja vu aspect of something conjured by a ouija board.

ERDEM

Erdem Moralioglu sent out a tour de force collection that is lushly romantic, a tribute to the character and wardrobe of the late Deborah “Debo” Cavendish, the Mitford girl who married the Duke of Devonshire and thence lived fabulously in one of the grandest of all estates, Chatsworth House. Debo was the queen of shabby chic, that particularly English style trope that combines the ruggedly practical country garb, with couture gowns and heirloom tiara – and this worn to feed rare-breed chickens. In this spirit, Erdem used 1940s floral curtains to make the gloriously chintzy skirts and ballgowns — and an inspired fusion of Barbour waxed jacket (also beloved of Princess Anne), voluminous opera cape, and a statement coat. The joyful collection was studded with bejewelled flapper dresses, cute cardies, and jewel-toned day dresses of Duchess satin.

SIMONE ROCHA

Known for her subversively romantic and perversely girlish aesthetics, Rocha has honed her signature style since her debut at London Fashion Week in 2010. The Chinese-Irish designer’s latest collection is a modern distillation in this baby-doll fashion: What can be more modern than meshing prim Victorian grandeur with the ubiquitous Crocs clog (it was a collaboration)? Or showing menswear in this same demurely romantic fashion, part chimneysweep, part Laduree cake, all pastels, and ribbons and dainty bows – on streetwear? The two pale pink dresses made of whorls of satin looked like the richest cream icing on the most rarefied cupcake. Real roses, nestled inside sheer garments, had all the heartbreaking fragility of Miss Havisham, as a virgin bride. Swags that caught up in giant bows, or ruched into roses looked fresh, especially when applied to men’s taffeta ensembles, such as a khaki coat or a windbreaker. The daintiest crinolines of baby lace, the innocent, icy pallor, clashed with the silver leather, and vampire black in an imaginative and evocative effort.

No one could ever say that LFW isn’t inclusive and diverse. On schedule was a big flotilla of new Asian designers who provided a breath of fresh air and a bracing vision that wasn’t dogged by the past, and unafraid to explore the future. The new Asians include Eudon Choi, from South Korea, who started his eponymous label in 2009, intelligently combining masculine tailoring with feminine sensibility, vulnerability and power, the kind of elegant clothes the evil second lead would wear in a K-drama.

Ray Chu, from Taipei, offered gender fluid streetwear; critically-acclaimed Chinese designer Kay Kwok (Hong Kong) showed futuristic contemporary menswear, with gaming and AI aesthetics, and seems to be the new Gareth Pugh. Others included Taiwanese-American Weiyin Chen, Jiaen Cai, Susan Fang and Yuhan Wang. Two worth a special mention would be New York-born Chinese, Chet Lo, whose clothes have a signature clingy mesh “popcorn” texture, and recalls Issey Miyake’s pleated fabric. Lo has amassed a loyal VIP following, including Angelica Cheung, Gwyneth Paltrow, Naomi Campbell, Sienna Miller, Fan Bingbing, Gigi Hadid, and Helen Mirren, to forge a new way forward.