June 12, 2015 |
You have proper posho fashion, right? The sort of stuff that faffs about with fabrics prefixed with stuff like duchesse and changeante and costs an absolute bomb. Then you have the lager lager lager shouting school of fashion, a bit harder and yob bier. You don’t get any prizes for guessing where Christopher Shannon pitches his tent.
Well, actually, there’s lots of posho stuff going on in Shannon’s clothes, all kinds of thought processes and interesting techniques and experimentation with volume and structure and elaborate fabric manipulation. But he deflates the whole thing, before it gets pompous, relating it to things like Marbella foam parties and council estate scaly sportswear, cutting bubbly couture-ish shapes in spongy aertex and then slicing them out above the pumped muscles of his teenager ravers. He also put a Zippo over every seat (he proper loves a collaboration that Shannon).
There are two levels of fashion at play here. The first is the immediate, socking impact of sporty colours and cuts, the shortest, sheerest shorts this side of G-A-Y podiums of a Saturday night, blokes flecked with foam and bouncing out on cut-away rubber-soled techy trainers. Christopher Shannon’s fun stuff. The second is the intellectual rigour behind those shapes, the interesting asymmetry in the chopped and changed jackets, the upside-down, multi-layered t-shirts and sweaters that, perhaps, could be inverted and converted, the other side flapping around the knees like an odd, misshapen skirt. That’s the experimental stuff, the forward-thinking pieces. Fashion’s future.
Photographer: Jason Lloyd-Evans
