Emilia Wickstead SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR Collection

Emilia Wickstead SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR

No question, a global pandemic can knock a brand sideways, but it can also make a designer sit up and ask herself: What do women need now? What do we want to wear? Who are we dressing for? And, where are we going wearing that? To some extent these are eternal questions. Designers are well versed in looking to the future, but these times are beyond all reasonable calculation. Who knows what world we will be living in when the spring collections land in stores? Anyway, they certainly came up for Emilia Wickstead earlier this year when she started planning this collection as the country—and the world—went into lockdown.

Wickstead’s glorious big hitters—I’m thinking of those dramatic silk gowns with huge bow backs and balloon-sleeved floor-sweepers—totaled zero this season. There’s a heady dose of realism here, and for good reason: Because she physically went through every look and asked herself, ‘Can I dress that up? Can I dress that down?’ With red carpet opportunities few and far between, it was a smart move to make a collection of refined, relatively simple pieces that can pivot from an easy lunch, to a dinner for two, to a small soirée at home.

Wickstead’s starting point was Faery Lands of the South Seas, a non-fiction book published in 1921 by travel writers James Norman Hall and Charles Bernard Nordhoff. She noticed it on her daughter Mercedes’s nightstand. It was a gift she received from her godmother the day she was born, and Wickstead realized she had never read it. The tales reference the designer’s homeland and her Samoan/New Zealand roots. “Their descriptions are like fairy tales but it’s an actual documentation of how they saw those places,” she says. An inky, beautifully illustrated sailboat print repeated over cotton poplin full skirts and cropped shirting smacks of nostalgia and goes some way in transporting us there.

Wickstead also poured over the work of Lucien Gauthier, a French documentary photographer enamored with Tahiti and the traditional dress of Tahitian women in their crisp, colonial shirting and printed sarongs. Hence then Polynesian fern sparsely placed on tailored maxi skirts and bandeau dresses, which she worked on with New Zealand artist Hannah Jensen who carves her own print blocks out of wood. If that sounds make-and-mend crafty, it wasn’t, because her next layer of research turned it modern. Once deconstructed, those shirt and skirt combinations led her to explore ’90s minimalism and Peter Lindbergh’s arresting images of that era, which extended to an elegant series of tailored Bermuda shorts and sweet bralettes.

The vast majority of this collection was made in cotton, which likely simplified the process of ordering fabric during lockdown. “I would meet my design assistant outdoors at the end of the street; we would talk and hold up fabrics in the light,” she recalls, “That’s how we put this collection together, and, of course, over countless Zoom calls.” With limited access to her pattern cutter she revisited ideas from her archive too, such as the Delphina skirt from her very first collection, reprised because of its likeness to a grass skirt in silhouette and movement. And the finishing touch? This season sees the debut of a collaboration with jeweler Jessica McCormack, a fellow New Zealander. The pair partnered up on a 10-piece capsule collection of interchangeable diamonds, and pearls from the South Seas.

As for her presentation, Wickstead commissioned Robin Mellor, the documentary filmmaker, to shoot a short film with a diverse cast of women across a range of ages, sizes, and races. Many are friends of the house, like Tank magazine’s Caroline Issa and Ruth Chapman, co-founder of MatchesFashion, who was the first to buy Emilia Wickstead when she placed an order exactly 10 years ago. “It actually still feels like we are putting on a show, especially as I was here last night—at midnight—moving things around, changing the lights, cleaning up whatever… It felt like it did when I launched my brand,” Wickstead smiled. “I think when it’s a smaller production you naturally have a more hands-on approach.

Certainly, I feel as tired; I feel as emotional. In comparison to staging a show I don’t feel like this has been an easier route!” No doubt. But it was certainly worth it.

See every single look from Emilia Wickstead SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR Collection in the gallery, below :