Fashion East Fall 2018 Ready-To-Wear....Fashionweekly..On Fow24news.com

The designers under Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East umbrella put on startlingly polished, individualist collections today. Without knowing any of their backstories, the fashion quotient spoke for itself......
Asai: highly-worked woven and tufted textiles, layered over subversive ‘lady’ tropes. Charlotte Knowles: edging towards something sexy from a female point of view. Supriya Lele: nineties minimalist values, filtered through a young woman’s lens. Symonds Pearmain: a whirl of wantable graphics dealt out in sporty-casual mode.

But the backstories count, as does the surrounding context of the system in which these designers find themselves. Compared to only a few years ago, the picture here shows a widening of perspective. Take Supriya Lele’s deft use of her British Asian family identity – her layering of sari fabric, Indian-influenced jewelry, and madras check onto her own obsession with the techno-nylon and tailoring of the school of Helmut Lang. “I wanted it to look more elevated than before,” she said. “Quite luxurious, modern and grown-up.” The synthesis is the message, reinforced by Lele’s insistence on casting mainly black and south Asian models: “Really strong, beautiful women. We wanted to represent those who are still not represented enough.”

Designer A Sai Ta, with his second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese heritage, is another representative of today’s diverse London creativity. He mentioned the word “assimilation” in his notes, suggesting crossing borders – the latticed, hand-fringed knits and intensely frayed denim maybe hinting at detritus picked up on a long journey. He took a satirical look at English upper class attire: ladylike handbags were weaponized with Chinese martial arts nunchucks as handles, and a headscarf came spiked with studs. At one point, a pair of beaded cowboy boot-cuffs had been assimilated into a pair of jeans – quite genius.

Symonds Pearmain is a duo – one half Anthony Symonds, who first cropped up with his eponymous label on the London scene in the early aughts; one half the young stylist Max Pearmain. The pair really know how to pull off a compelling look – all stripes and checks, occasionally gilded with gold leather curliques. But after Symonds’ experience in the art world he knows he is making a re-entry to the runway at a time when fashion start-ups are facing a tougher-than-ever retail landscape. Like the other hopefuls of Fashion East – and independents the world over – he realizes they will have to carve out a limited-run partly hand-made-to-order alternative to mass manufacturing and boom-growth. “I’m not going to try to mend the machine,” he said. “I’m interested in trying to slowly develop, along with everyone else, a model that has some sort of sustainable potential. The idea of scaling it up massively – who wants that? I don’t. It’s dead, and I don’t want to deal with it.”