The Next Savage Beauties

When I put out an opinion poll out on Instagram asking which young designer could, aesthetics aside, leave a lasting legacy like Lee McQueen, the names that came up pleasingly revolved around London: Simone Rocha, Christopher Kane and J.W. Anderson.  They are all brands with sure fire longevity in the making (or in Kane’s case, this already exists).  There were also some curveball answers like Jeremy Scott or Alexander Wang, who are perhaps diametrically opposite to McQueen.  Perhaps people got stuck on the word legacy and thought of the brands that would go the distance.

To conclude my collaboration with American Express, which first began with a visit to the McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition at the V&A, I wanted to put together a list of trailblazing designers that I think draw comparison with McQueen on an aesthetic level, but that also place innovation and experimentation at the heart of what they do, and who might also merit having their work scrutinised by a museum curator twenty years from now, just as McQueen has.  Nowadays, the word ‘groundbreaking’ isn’t often seen in fashion show reviews, unless used as hyperbole.  And yet I believe that McQueen, for all his love of the historical and the traditional, did break new ground, whether it was in the cut of a silhouette or in his mode of showmanship.  Therefore perhaps the question should be different:  Who is currently innovating fashion and pushing it to somewhere that can be called ‘new’?

The one name that did get crop up on Instagram unsurprisingly, was Dutch designer Iris van Herpen.If not for the stylistic and thematic similarities, then for her demi-couture approach that only recently saw her branch off from haute couture to ready to wear.  In my opinion, you can see her work is no less considered, as incredible close-up shots of the fabrics from her latest “Hacking Infinity” A/W 15-6 collection reveal.  Her work simply does not come from the realm of convention, nor is it bound by a sense of reality.  

For her latest collection, van Herpen imagined the biosphere of another planet and the textures that might inhabit its terrain.  A stainless steel weave is burnt so that it glimmers with hues of an oil-slick and then pleated and shaped into circular formations.  A 3D hand woven grid-like textile is created in collaboration with Aleksandra Gaca, creating an optical illusion.  In an ongoing bid to constantly look beyond fashion, van Herpen also works with professor of architecture Philip Beesley, to design sculptural dresses made out of fractal-like geometries.  Crystals crafted from 3D printing grow from beneath the vertiginous heels of Noritaka Tatehana.  McQueen had already begun to probe the dystopian questions of how the world might look in the future.  Van Herpen has set herself the path to take that probing further, aided by technologies in fabrications that McQueen may have delved into himself. 

It might be fair to say Kunihiko Morinaga of Anrealage has drawn more comparisons with Hussein Chalayan than Alexander McQueen. His shows, which have decamped from Tokyo Fashion Week to Paris for the last two seasons, deserve praise for their willingness to open our jaded eyes to something really new.  Last season for Morinaga’s Paris debut, he played with photo and heat sensitive inks on white garments so that faint patterns would be revealed when shone with laser-like beams of light.   

This season, the effect was more dramatic as it was inverted with seemingly black fabrics made to reveal hidden patterns under ultraviolet light.  That effect was pre-empted with blacked-out garments printed with fade-in/fade-out patterns. In the final portion of the show, out trooped models in black ensembles which were embedded with photochromic patterns, that could only be seen when under UV light.  The UV spotlights moving around revealed distinct patterns of polka dots, floral prints and checks that would then disappear into darkness as soon as the UV was switched off.  It’s difficult to assess where all this supreme fabric research and innovation can go in the practical world, but I believe Morinaga is shining a spotlight (literally) on what may be possible in the world of textiles and there’s still so much potential.  Anrealage’s shows are a feast for the brain.  You leave excited about what is next.

A video posted by @susiebubblevid on May 21, 2015 at 6:08am PDT

A video posted by Susie Lau (@susiebubble) on Mar 3, 2015 at 8:55am PST

Finally, The Unseen isn’t a fashion label per se, but to me, it embodies the trailblazing spirit of McQueen in what it does.  Founded by self-proclaimed alchemist Lauren Bowker, who studied printed textiles at the Royal College of Art, The Unseen is more like a house of exploration, focusing on the metamorphosis of materials.  Bowker has been creating chromic, colour-chana inks that can then be applied to various disciplines, with fashion being one of them.  Alongside Bowker, The Unseen, now based in the Vaults in Somerset House, consists of anatomists, engineers, chemists and pattern cutters, who collectively aim to put their “magick” into bespoke projects.