Postcard from London, England: Fashion fusion

Above left: 19th-century Indian fine muslin dress embroidered with silk, silver and gold thread, Victoria & Albert Museum South Kensington. Above right: Lampshade skirt, Mary Katrantzou, 2011, The Design Museum.

Visiting numerous museums in a row, it’s impossible for me not to compare what might seem as incongruous exhibits. A portion of “Rebel: Thirty Years of London Fashion” at The Design Museum struck me as almost consciously mimicking the Asian fashion display in the Victoria & Albert Museum combining robes and fabrics.

Thirty years represents an anniversary celebration of the British Fashion Council NEWGEN program offering young designers an opportunity to expose their creativity to a wide audience. With a fresh M.A. in Fashion degree, Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) was in that first group of beneficiaries.

Set against a dramatic black and white backdrop, two of the outfits below represent a recreation of McQueen’s second show, his “Taxi Driver Collection.” Strapped for cash, McQueen and Simon Ungless cobbled together designs in the front room of their South London flat.

According to the exhibition notes:

A postcard of Travis Bickle in the 1976 film Taxi Driver inspired Lee’s naming of the collection. Simon distorted that found image and others on a photocopier, producing screen prints on the back of their dismantled door, as well as dipping and dripping latex onto fabric and incorporating feather and human hair…. Pheasant feathers were sourced from Simon’s gamekeeper father and hair was collected from a local barbershop…. The two dresses… are created by Simon for this exhibition…. One is black lace treated with latex, the second is moulded in resin with trapped threads and feathers.

So why did Umgless have to attempt to reproduce those early designs? The pair were clubbers. All were lost, according to Dazed:

Post-show, with positive reviews from the press ringing in his ears, McQueen packed the line down into black bags and carted them off to a nightclub, where he hid it behind the bins as he partied late into the night. Unsurprisingly, when morning rolled round, the bags were gone, tragically destined for landfill. 

But the exhibit reflects a dramatic turn, a color explosion in fabric patterns by subsequent classes of NEWGEN designers. Color began to define a new British look.

For the contemporary fashions above, the couturiers were invited to create backdrops reflecting their creations – similar to the treatment Victoria & Albert curators chose.