Fashion East headed west to a sustainable innovation hub called Mills Fabrica. There were three designers showing, one as a presentation and the other two on a runway. At the end of his three-season Fashion East tour, two were making their debut and the last was sailing into the sunset. In the order we got to see them, is the who, what, and why of this season’s dead stock selection.
In the Vogue Runway gallery, you can see the first Fashion East installment of Standing Ground. The heroically bearded young Irishman, a graduate of the Royal College of Art, arranged his models in pairs, each standing on either side of one of the supporting pillars. The subjects were still and the surroundings were raw, which spoke nicely to Stewart. He said that it is a modern iteration of eveningwear that is inspired by ancient culture. It is twinned with ideas of the futuristic and imagined. The ancient standing stones were Stewart’s initial inspiration.
The invited sightseers were able to see Stewart’s new brand of fashion monumentalism. His models in full-length swaths of variously colored cotton jersey were etched with decorative runes. Stewart described the bands as “gestural” and said the panels were inspired by Neolithic carvings. Tailoring-rooted canvassed inserts at one hip, adorned by one of those bands, created a sense of bias- enhanced motion.
The collection was based on the ancient and immovable. Stewart wants to show in runway format next season, and it will be interesting to see how human movement meshes with his pieces.
She sought to place front and center elements of the female form that are often overlooked or marginalized by an exclusionary aesthetic hegemony. She said that sometimes they feel conscious about the area under the arm or under the breast. This collection is about celebrating areas that we might feel self-conscious about, that we might otherwise hide from.