Hours after Caroline Rush, the chief executive of the British Fashion Council, opened the London stock market in Paternoster Square to kick off the 40th anniversary celebrations of London fashion week, Downing Street confirmed that the UK has entered a recession.
A collapse of retail is not the ideal mood music to get this dressiest of birthday parties started but having survived 40 years, London fashion week is bullish about the future. Burberry is building a catwalk in east London’s Victoria Park, while the designer Simone Rocha will take over the capital’s oldest surviving church for a show that will double as a homecoming victory lap after her triumphant Paris haute couture show for Jean Paul Gaultier last month.
Sunday’s Bafta ceremony ensures a celebrity-packed weekend in the capital. Nominees including Claire Foy, Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan will be on the red carpet at the Royal Festival Hall, along with David Beckham, who will be presenting an award, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who will perform her Saltburn-revived hit, Murder on the Dancefloor, at the ceremony.
After Preen held its show on a breezy floating moored catwalk at Woods Quay on the bank of the Thames, Justin Thornton, the co-designer who runs the brand with his wife, Thea Bregazzi, said: “We would have gone ahead even if it was raining.”
The high cost of staging a show forced the couple into a three-season hiatus, but a spur of the moment decision to return was announced with just three days’ notice. Budget did not stretch to a rain contingency plan, but their luck held. With Mary Shelley as the muse of the season, black lace face masks and rose pink satin eiderdowns belted into skirts had the flair and boldness that has been a signature of London fashion week for four decades.
There was more resilience from Paul Costelloe, the last man standing from London fashion week’s original lineup, who first showed in 1984 and presented his latest collection on Friday morning. Now 78, Costelloe, who rose to fame as an early favourite of Diana, Princess of Wales, was unable to attend his latest show due to illness, but wrote in a message to guests that his showcase of herringbone tweed coats and ivory wool tailoring “expresses my view that classic design still has its place in high fashion”.
Han Chong, the designer of Self-Portrait, is hosting a lunar new year party in Chinatown on Saturday night while Downing Street will host an official tea party to close the catwalk season next week, but the British show season will keep going. Britain is in vogue as a location for destination fashion shows. Gucci has announced that it will follow last year’s spectacular show at the Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul with a show in London on 13 May. The venue has not been announced, but with new designer Sabato de Sarno taking Gucci back to its classic roots, a collection honouring Guccio Gucci, a luggage porter at the Savoy who was inspired to found his own line of cases in Florence in 1921, is rumoured to be on the cards. After the success of Chanel’s show in Manchester in December, other major brands are known to be looking at locations in the north of England and in Scotland.
Menswear is making a fashion week comeback with a show by Dunhill. The brand’s new designer, Simon Holloway, wants London’s tailoring heritage, which he says is a constant reference in menswear worldwide, to get the credit it deserves. Holloway chose the recently reopened National Portrait Gallery as the location for his show, telling Womenswear Daily he “wanted to show the collection in a quintessentially British environment, and not in a stuffy old club on Pall Mall with all the unfortunate trappings of empire that nobody wants to look at”.
The British fashion industry contributes £21bn to the economy, and employs about 900,000 people. But a harsh economic climate has seen the small independent designers who populate the London schedule squeezed out of the picture by the increasing dominance of the giant luxury groups of Paris and Milan. The award-winning designer Christopher Kane, one-time protege of Donatella Versace, was forced to close his label last year.
