Burberry is off schedule, Victoria Beckham has a showroom in Paris and Alexander McQueen is heading stateside.
By guest author Luke Leitch from Vogue Business. With assistance by Kati Chitrakorn.
When the British Fashion Council revealed the final line-up for this season’s London Fashion Week, starting today, there were several notable absences. Burberry, Victoria Beckham, JW Anderson and Christopher Kane aren’t showing during the five-day event. Without its tentpole shows, can London Fashion Week maintain its edge and allure?
The reasons for the no-shows are various. Yesterday, Burberry revealed that it will present a physical show in London, but off schedule on 11 March shortly after Paris comes to an end. As for the other names, Victoria Beckham is said to be creating a collection film to be shown during Paris Fashion Week, alongside previews in a showroom. Jonathan Anderson is going on the road and Christopher Kane is showing off-schedule on Instagram. Another leading London brand, Alexander McQueen, has not been on the official schedule for some time now. It used to feature at the standalone mens’ fashion week (which has since been blended with LFW), and last year showed the Spring/Summer 2022 collection off schedule in an inflatable bubble on a rooftop in Wapping. For Autumn/Winter, however, McQueen will show off-schedule in New York.
There is no doubt that these absences will be felt during London Fashion Week proper. However, of all the names absent, it is Burberry that will be most sorely missed, because of its ability to attract fashion’s key international editors and buyers. Burberry, first under Christopher Bailey and then under Riccardo Tisci, has been London’s paramount “tentpole” fashion show for many seasons — the week’s must-see event for reasons both commercial and creative. As Britain’s sole FTSE 100 luxury house, and Britain’s only undisputable top-tier commercial global luxury marque, Burberry is the only independent British label with the reputational and commercial gravity that can guarantee to pull them in.
As Lulu Kennedy, the founder of Fashion East, observes: “It is a pity that Burberry isn’t showing at London Fashion Week. Because, when they do, the level of design and production acts as a highlight for the entire week and creates a knock-on of positives across the schedule. They bring all the girls into town. And, having Burberry creates that high-low mixture in the London proposition that I really appreciate.”
Even having just one undisputed tentpole show on a fashion week schedule draws both models and audiences, which in turn draws other labels to showcase there in order to share those resources. Looking back for instance at the Spring/Summer 2016 season — when Alison Moyet performed at what was one of Bailey’s most magnificently British pomp-and-ceremony shows for Burberry Prorsum — the London Fashion Week schedule was also armed with the oomph of Versus (under Anthony Vacarello), Paul Smith, and Hunter Original (then fully-focused on the fashion space). And, naturally, it featured the full roster of London’s established creative elite in Jonathan Anderson, Simone Rocha, Christopher Kane and Erdem. It was a glitzy and great season to cover.
However, the absence of the “power players” that have traditionally attracted hype, celebrity and sizzle to London — while being on-the-face-of-it regrettable — also represents an opportunity to focus on the one criterion under which London Fashion Week is arguably not only “a leading fashion event” but the leading fashion event: and that is in the identification and amplification of industry-leading creative talent.
Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower, who also acts as the British Fashion council’s ambassador for emerging talent and chairs the Newgen committee, says London is seeing a fantastic surge of British talent, which is informed by the multicultural identities of communities throughout the UK, via its fashion schools.
“Many of these designers are the first, second or third-generation children of parents who came to the UK from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. The names I’m excited by include Maximilian Davis who was just named as a semi-finalist in the latest LVMH Prize; Priya Ahluwalia of course; Saul Nash — his show, I think, will be one of the most interesting of the week and he is in the running for the Woolmark.” she said. Feben, who recently graduated from Central Saint Martins, is “one to watch,” per Mower, along with Supriya Lele and Nicholas Daley.
“This is a particularly rich and exciting moment in terms of new talent emerging from London, and increasingly the city is developing a diverse and relevant pool of creatives you can see being in high demand for hirings and collaborations across the industry,” she adds.
London is never going to be able to compete with Paris and Milan in terms of commercial heft because the vast majority of the design and manufacture of global luxury goods is based in France and Italy. Those fashion weeks are underpinned by industry-generated resources and backing, both private and public, that Britain’s cannot match. And, even if it is running short of a few tentpoles of its own, the comparative size of the US market means that New York Fashion Week will often be stronger than London.
Yet, none of those competing fashion capitals — and yes, the capitals are always locked in mostly unspoken competition — can comprehensively claim to outmuscle London when it comes to ranking the broader creative influence of the designers that have emerged from its fashion week in recent decades. Erdem and Simone Rocha, who are showing in London this season and are therefore acting as its de facto tentpoles, can be listed alongside Anderson, Craig Green, Kane, Grace Wales Bonner, Martine Rose, Molly Goddard, Richard Quinn, Marques’ Almeida and Mary Katrantzou, and more, as part of a golden generation of London-sourced talent that rose to prominence in the last decade or so. More recently emerged talents include Samuel Ross, Priya Ahluwalia and Bianca Saunders, and as Mower noted there are many more exciting designers following in their wake.
Both through Newgen and Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East, London continues to bring new talent — much of it developed in UK fashion schools — to a global audience every season while also acting as the pre-eminent stage upon which smaller and often scrappier brands can independently present and come to the fore, much more effectively than in Paris or Milan. This is where London’s apparent weakness — that lack of “power-player” tentpoles — becomes a strength, industry watchers argue. Because, as well as providing shelter, tentpoles can also serve to overshadow, and when a fashion week is as bristling with them as in France and Italy, the amount of attention that editors and buyers can spare to seek out those new and galvanising talents becomes extremely limited.
“London has never been about competing with Paris or Milan. There’s no point in asking young brands to try and act like luxury brands because you are asking them to fail,” says Fashion East’s Kennedy. “As a philanthropically-driven platform we try to be the best possible facilitator for designers whose talent we are convinced by and passionate about, our selection is not decided by their turnover or commerciality. I genuinely love unearthing and helping exciting and independent designers on instinct. And, occasionally you will encounter a designer who you know has got what it takes — that’s what it was like with Jonathan (Anderson) and Kim (Jones).”
As London Fashion Week begins today, it’s much more useful to focus on its strength as a springboard for talent that is emerging, than fret about the absence of talents already emerged. More often than not, the next big thing comes from London.