September 15, 2017 |
Supermarket shades. That’s the way Irish designer Richard Malone described the colour palette for his SS18 show this morning, our first of London Fashion Week. Which meant lots of blue. Tesco blue, and something a little paler, the two coming together in plastic bag-stripes that wove their way through the collection. There was also Co-op turquoise. Asda green. Aldi Yellow. Those colours were formed into Malone’s signature structural pleated gowns, here the silhouette loosened up a little on last season – gowns were loosely tied at the waist, or fell away into strands of raw-cut fabric, whilst striped bodysuits and matching gloves lent a feminine shape, inspired, as per the notes, by showgirls in Blackpool. But feminine might be to miss the point – “this is not glamour,” he said of the collection, Malone re-created the showgirl’s outfits into something that you could, well, wear. He called this an act of rebellion – that idea of subversiveness coming through in the flashes of body, slices of leg and upper thigh, or bits of bum, revealed as pleated mini-dresses bounced behind the models as they walked, accompanied by the apt soundtrack of Sisquo’s Thong Song, played by a string trio.
