What better way to spend the latter part of a Friday than with an mid-afternoon threesome? By which, of course, we mean a threesome of design talent, courtesy of Fashion East’s MAN show, which over ten years since its birth, continues each season to showcase a triumvirate of London’s best up-and-comers. Not that Charles Jeffrey’s LOVERBOY isn’t already up and, well, come – it was his third show as part of MAN and completes his stratospheric 2016 with a – can we call it darker – collection? Not least because the crescendo included a person painted black with a giant sort of second head situation and a kind of zombie dance troupe. Or those giant faceless totems. It was wild, nuts (all good things, by the way) and dotted throughout, with some great tailoring – referencing the seventies, eighties and 1780s in the process. And there was a miniskirt. A fashion moment. “Like watching an early Galliano,” Sophia says. We’re obsessed. Per Gotesson’s boys, on the other hand, were a little quieter – strapped on to a sort of wooden construction with pillows attached to them. Which looked quite like something we would like to be doing. Strapped up in bed, that is. The clothes were a bit pyjama-y too – roomy shirts and trousers in red checkered fabric, a smattering of the subverted, maximised frayed denim. Last, but certainly not least, was Feng Chen Wang, who proposed the erogenous zone for Autumn. The thigh. Which was framed by a cut-out section on a spangly metallic pair of trousers, which looked, to our eyes at least, very nice. So too did the exposed tums and that Angelina Jolie-single leg our situation. But that’s our minds wandering – this was sportswear, but not as you know it. We left satisfied.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
