London Fashion Week: Day One
Officially, the first day of London Fashion Week - today, September 17th. But around these few days there are a million parties, exhibitions and discoveries, so in fact it all started over a week ago - the opening of the exhibition Hussein Chalayan in the gallery Lisson. It turned out that Chalayan simultaneously holds two exhibitions: the second, smaller and quieter, opened yesterday in the Spring Projects space. In normal times, this is such a very fashionable studio on the outskirts of the world, where there is a great bar of its own. Everyone who shoots at Spring - the editor of London's entire gloss and advertising world, tired models and photographers, artists and art critics go to this bar. The space is very friendly.
At the opening Hussein Chalayan wore in his arms an incredibly nosed and curly son and whispered in the corner with Zaho Hadid. In this, in fact, the highlights of the evening ended: the exhibition itself is called the B-Side, and this is a very accurate name. A pair of plastic models of dresses two years ago, a video about beautiful people and clothes from the video. Therefore, we very quickly left for another discovery (in London all interior gallery events take place on Thursdays) - exhibitions Gosha Rubchinsky in the tiny gallery of Pleasant Associates. There are a lot of such galleries in London, and they are all similar - a small white room, entrance from the street, exhibitions are very intimate.
Photo from the exhibition Gosha Rubchinsky
Photos of high-rise buildings from the outskirts of Moscow, St. Petersburg sailors - I'm not sure that the British are able to understand what Gosha says. Still, this is a very Russian history, and it has to be explained on the fingers.
That a fashion week is taking place in London is not only clear in the vicinity of the Strand and around the places where the shows are held. If you walk down the street somewhere in the Hoxton or Islington area, then the crowd of models will rush towards. They are very easy to calculate: they are tall, thin girls, dressed mostly in black, with a big bag or a backpack, into which the lookbook fits, a plump A4 album. Each has an A-Z card in their hands. This is the most convenient map of London, which is issued to all models in the agencies.
The audience at Somerset House
Today I went to Somerset House to get my badge and look at what is called the big name Exhibition. Around - pretty wild mix of American tourists and fashionistas with accreditations. The main screenings take place in the pavilion, built on the inner square Somerset, and in order to get to the exhibition halls and to the reception desk, one has to go through the colonnade at the entrance and go around the pavilion. Near the colonnade there are about 30 street fashion photographers on duty. The most ridiculous thing I saw today are the three photographers who photographed the photographer Ivan Rodich.
Street-fashion photographer Ivan Rodich
The exhibition is essentially a Sunday Up Market with the coolest brands, but nothing can be bought - this is an exhibition. Shoes Finsk, minimarket orphan dresses, hats Stephen jones and about a million more mini-booths with everything in the world. This is a purely professional story - for buyers and for some particularly corrosive editors.
Exhibition for Buyers
The exhibition once again proved to me that I really, really love Cassette playa - they have everything with fantasy well. Instead of a dull stand-up, they put a black room where you can go behind the black curtain and make yourself a mini-movie of 6 frames with quite trash symbols, like from a primitive graphic editor from the early 2000s. Feather frames, 3D naked women, wolves, zippers and Tough Luck inscriptions. The class.
Update: the next day, I accidentally found a piece of paper in my pocket with a link to the Cassette Playa website, where I posted all the animated videos, including my yesterday's one. After that, I stuck on the site for about thirty minutes.
On the shows are kilometer queues. Having stood waiting for Felder.Felder for about forty minutes and after listening to about a million people repeating "fucking schedules, huh?", I realized that I was late for a meeting and waved my hand. Since all the shows have become possible to watch online live (after the show, video appears by the evening of the current day), during the fashion week the most important thing was the parties. Today is the PPQ party, the official opening of the week.
Shows
All shows are broadcast live on a separate site - londonfashionweeklive.co.uk. Some brands approach their online programs more demanding and turn them into a separate event - for example, the Burberry Prorsum show will be broadcast on Look At Me.
The steeper the mark, the later the date of the show; On the first day, their summer collections demonstrate less significant, although as a rule, equally interesting designers. One of the bright highlights of the first day of the LFW is the show. Maria Grachvogel.
View the show in full.
A former banker from the City of London, Maria founded her brand in 1994 and now dresses celebrities like El Macpherson and Yasmin Le Bon. In the summer collection, gentle beige alternates with bright yellow, pearl gray and deep blue, a lot of draperies, a lot of flying maxi dresses made of translucent crepe and silk, but there are also modest cases and casual wide pants. But even with an abundance of draperies and the presence of bright prints, the silhouettes remain very clean and clear.
Another interesting collection - Bora aksu. Coming from Turkey, Bora showed an avant-garde set of short dresses with ruffles and insane prints and skinny trousers with layered tops and sophisticated blouses. But most of all we liked the incredible tights. For the show, Bohr asked his aunt in Izmir to tie up almost two dozen giant ants (!) For him to decorate their models' hair - since the collection idea, he said, arose when he once observed an anthill.
View the show in full.
The first day of the LFW ended, as is customary, with a party. The party has its own rules. The most important thing is heels. The higher the better. This is a dress code, and it can not be violated. Even a gray-haired old woman - not sure why she went there - was at a PPQ party on such heels that I would not dare to even try on. You can’t take a young man with you; he will obviously be bored. It is necessary to take with you either a girlfriend or a gay man - this is 99% of all those present. Dancing, a lot of beautiful people, sequins and leopard prints, as well as all the main heels, dresses and bags of the season at every second - this is a plus. The forty-minute queues for cocktails are a minus. In front of me in the queue stood all the same Ivan Rodich - he, I think, was fixing on blondes with long hair not only in the blog, but also in life: he had four long-haired girlfriends with him, and he touched everyone for his ass.
View photos from all hits of the first day of LFW.
Watch videos from LFW hits.