Fashion East SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR Collection

Fashion East SPRING 2021 READY-TO-WEAR

The 20th anniversary celebration of Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East falls this year. Thanks to her talent incubator—which got its name as an antiestablishment upstart when London Fashion Week was losing its relevance—countless designers have taken their first steps on whatever runway she managed to secure at the time. Among the many who owe her thanks are Roksanda Ilincic, Gareth Pugh, Simone Rocha, Marques’Almeida, Matty Bovan, Art School, Nasir Mazhar, Stefan Cooke, and Mowalola Ogunlesi.

The latest four, kept under her wing even at the height of the pandemic, say with one accord that Kennedy is their motivator in chief. “I admire her fire,” said Saul Nash, speaking for an entire community.

Goom Heo

“During the lockdown, it’s like you’re wondering what the neighbors are doing. I could actually see people across the building. Slowly,” Goom Heo chuckled, “the idea came up that I would think about voyeurism as a theme.” Heo, who’s in her second Fashion East season, has a sense of humor. The Korean designer, who graduated from Central Saint Martins M.A. in 2019, had an Instagram account named Goom Is Watching You back then. Part of her new collection has embroideries of her own eyes on it, complete with fringed eyelashes. “There are some playful bits, yes!” she agreed.

What she does is more intriguing than straight-up funny, though. She dresses men, with an offbeat eye for color, texture, and drape. And when they walk, her garments often take on a whole new life in movement. This season, she’s been concentrating on the male torso, cropping jersey tops or tightly swathing them, and leaving fabric to flow to the ground on one side.

Questioning the gender of clothes is also a Goom Heo thing, dressing her man in a velvet mini-skort and kitten-heeled mary janes, or an oversized printed cape (or is it a dress?) with multiple fringes. It amuses her when people ask why she doesn’t design for women. “I think I quite like the idea of people saying it’s womenswear, and I’m saying it’s menswear! A lot of shops put it in the women’s category, which I’m really happy about, because there are no boundaries between the genders.”

Nensi Dojaka

Nensi Dojaka woke up to a massive surprise on August 31. Bella Hadid had posted a picture of herself at the VMAs, wearing the designer’s black trousers and extraordinarily tulle and spaghetti-strapped bodysuit from her first-ever collection—and had tagged her. “Instagram went crazy! Everything I had on Ssense completely sold out,” she boggled. (Google it: Stories mentioning the Hadid sister and the now-not-so-unknown Albanian designer have circulated in multiple languages around the globe.)

It’s proved a totally well-deserved compliment, because Dojaka’s sophomore collection is even more stunning and extensive than the first. In every slide, there’s another how-did-she-do-that moment, delicately crafted in overlapping zones of tulle and organza, ingeniously draped twists of crepe, and suspended from minute rouleau straps.

She said that an image of the ballerina Sylvie Guillem had set her off, but that doesn’t really explain the level of accomplishment in these pieces. Maybe it was the months of lockdown that gave her the hours to work out the geometry, the layering, and the 3D engineering it must have taken to get their asymmetrical twists and turns to stay on the body.

It also gave Dojaka the time to figure out how to integrate bodysuits, swimsuits, blouses, a long sheer skirt, and a tiny skirt into the mix, as well as a black pantsuit. Shot with the complicity of an all-female team—Harley Weir photographing, Francesca Burns styling—it’s startlingly original.

A lot of it’s down to the fruition of three years spent studying lingerie at London College of Fashion, before she graduated from her M.A. at Central Saint Martins. The rest is a great eye, sensibility, and patience.

Being able to refine as difficult a set of techniques as Dojaka has set herself is exceptional—and now the world is watching her.

Saul Nash

“We danced toward liberation, as a group.” The shift from runway to film has proven a gift for Saul Nash, whose whole raison d’être lies in designing clothes for bodies in movement. The film he made with his filmmaker partner Fx Goby to illustrate his spring 2021 collection came out of a trip they made to the coast after weeks of being cooped up in London. The exhilaration of “moving from a confined space to a sense of freedom” inspired Nash to go back later with a group of his dancer friends to capture the technical dynamics—and the emotion—of the garments in action.

“It was the turn of the spring. I was thinking of the hyper-tones of sport against the colors of nature,” he remembered. “And a whirling sensation, like Sufi dancers, or those early films of how Loie Fuller danced with all those volumes of fabric.” The result is a collection he called Flipside, constructed with ingenious overlapping layers and concealed inserts, which give the garments potential to “shape-shift” as their wearers move. One example is a jacket “that you can rip apart as you’re running, and becomes a cape.” Another, a gray sweatshirt, is apparently as generic as can be front-on, but is actually inserted with green silk panels to facilitate movement.

But the point about Nash’s sportswear is the way he absorbs the opinions of his community into his process. “We all stay in communication on a WhatsApp group. There’s a dialogue we have with the boys: What would you wear, what would you like to wear, how does it feel?” In corporate contexts, that might be called a focus group, but the crucial difference is that Nash regards himself as one of his band of brothers. “I see it like a cohort of dancers, unofficial dance company,” he said.

For all of them, there’s a dimension that goes beyond technical performance to take on issues that push at the masculine stereotypes of sport and sportswear. “Should men dance?” Nash shrugged rhetorically. “You know, growing up, there was always that question. So really, what it is this season is exploring a spectrum of sensitivity, versus kind of generic or rigid silhouettes. There’s always a development, a way of making it better. I want to implement that.”

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