The designer who made her mark with Villanelle’s frothy dress in Killing Eve is bouncing back with fizzing explosions of colour
When the fashion industry shut down in March, designer Molly Goddard thought she “might never make another collection again”. With orders rapidly cancelled as stores closed their doors, Goddard recalls being “on the phone to my accountant every day”. As the first wave receded and the world opened up, she began designing a few “very pared back” pieces. “I was thinking I might make 10 simple white dresses, perhaps.”
Then, as her team became able to spend some time together in the studio, “more and more colour” crept in. In the end the collection is one of Goddard’s most exuberant to date, with traffic-light colours and fizzing explosions of tulle on almost every look.
It is no accident that seven of the 31 outfits in Goddard’s new collection are pink frilly dresses. Pink smocked-tulle dresses are to Goddard’s brand what bouclé tweed jackets are to Chanel. They have given her an instantly recognisable signature look – and one which resonates with alpha women of the moment. Beyoncé wore a frothy, floor-length Molly Goddard dress, accessorised with a matching fuchsia headdress, in this summer’s visual album Black is King. Villanelle, the alpha assassin in Killing Eve, became an on-screen style icon when she wore an earlier, paler and shorter iteration of the same dress in 2018.
Goddard’s obsession with smocking and shirring is ingrained from the dresses her mother, an art teacher, made for the designer and her sister Alice when they were children. As a young unknown designer Goddard began working with tulle simply because smocking and gathering require large volumes of fabric, and nylon tulle is inexpensive.