Designer's London Fashion Week show held just as Christopher Kane's flagship store in Mayfair is announced
The spotlight suits Christopher Kane. Eight months after signing a major deal with luxury mothership Kering, which fast-tracked his tiny company onto the path to major label status, on Monday he staged one of his best London fashion week shows to date.
Kane is flourishing by embracing the advantages of life in the fast lane while keeping a foothold in reality. Just three hours before the show, Alexander de Brettes, the label's recently appointed CEO, announced that Kering will bankroll a major Christopher Kane boutique, to open in Mayfair next year. The flagship, on Mount Street, will put the Kane label alongside Balenciaga, Christian Louboutin, and Lanvin. By contrast, the catwalk show was staged in the Farmiloe building, a near-derelict warehouse near Smithfield meat market that has been unoccupied since 1999.
The funds now at Kane's disposal were evident in some aspects – a no-expense-spared cast of 54 models walked in the show – but backstage the designer still had pins tacked to his T-shirt, the better to effect last-minute adjustments before the runway. And when asked whether the high-tech fabrics on the catwalk were evidence of more money to spend on fabric production, he looked aghast. "I ironed and bonded those garments myself," he said. "I mean, maybe we could afford to get someone else to do it – but if I don't do it myself, it won't be right."
This collection was about flowers. "But when I say flowers – I'm not going to do, you know, roses, done to death, blah blah blah." Instead, it was "the sexual undertones of flowers", of anatomy and deflowering, which formed the starting point for the clothes. A visit to his Scottish high school brought back memories of art classes spent dissecting, examining and drawing buttercups and carnations. "I started thinking about how much we take flowers for granted, and how incredible they are, and how the female sexual organs have so much in common with the internal structure of a flower. When I was growing up, my mum always used 'flower' as her word for vagina – it's a Scottish thing. I prefer sex to be an undertone in my clothes, rather than too obvious, so I was interested in how flowers are graphic but concealed and suggestive at the same time."
Jean Cocteau said that style "is a simple way of saying complicated things." Viewed as sartorial self-expression of the point at which Kane now finds himself, the flower symbolism seemed double-edged. Sweatshirts emblazoned with the words 'FLOWER' and 'PETAL', and dresses embroidered with snippets of botanical diagrams of life cycles, seemed to celebrate the notion of a humble seed growing into something glorious. On the other hand, the theme of deflowering is hard to divide from loss of innocence. And the evening dresses in slippery satin, ruched and clasped with crystal reimaginings of the metal clips used in school dissection seemed vaguely sinister in origin – although, in true contradictory Kane signature style, these dresses were among the most elegant and desirable on the catwalk.
The shift in identity toward becoming a grown-up luxury brand was most evident in the catwalk in a very simple way, in the longer hemlines, which fell to the most part on or just below the knee. The Kane label is no longer aimed just at twentysomething "It" girls, but at a more womanly international clientele, who is less inclined to wear a micro-mini.