Last night, Brick Lane’s Truman Brewery was transformed into a rave-meets-catwalk for the Fashion East FW25 show. In lieu of beer the brewery served up elaborate cocktails, as guests milled around the space before models emerged down an industrial plastic-shealth backed runway. This season’s designers, whose talent is being fostered by the non-profit incubator, were Nuba World, Loutre, and Olly Shinder, who delivered ambitious but surprisingly wearable collections.
Nuba
Nuba, headed up by Cameron Williams and Jebi Labembika, employs fashion to explore the contrast between family heritage and the cities we grow up in, with particular reference to the design partners’ childhoods in South London, and their Afro-Carribean and West African heritage.
This season’s collection was an investigation of this contrast: of whether our physical surroundings or the people around us shape us. The collection’s greys and brown tones delineated cities, but were brought into sharp relief by the blues and greens that reign supreme in the natural landscapes of West Africa and the Caribbean. According to the press release, the splashes of cyan blue also represented the universal corner shop carrier bag: a class-defying essential, a universal equalizer.
The collection was also the first time the duo designed womenswear. "The biggest challenge is kind of imagining that world for a woman and also making it real making it feel functional at the same time because I think often womenswear is not as functional as menswear and we also like to have a lot of functionality and adaptability within our clothes," Williams told Culted post show. "We wanted to show that the menswear and womenswear were the same but also give the women a character of their own, so I think that was the challenge at the start—trying to understand what that is. But I think once we started draping stuff and cutting stuff and doing samples and twirls, I think we started to see that actually they are the same, but they have just little nuances to them...It was really important for us to make the women feel beautiful and effortless and strong The same way we do the men," chimed Labembika.
Olly Shinder
This season, Central Saint Martins Graduate Olly Shinder showcased his fourth collection under the Fashion East umbrella. His focus has long been analysing and subverting masculine dress codes, and this season was no different: the collection was inspired by none other than Tim Burton’s Batman and the “slim-lined restraint of late 90s European menswear.” (Per the collection’s press release.) The garments were utilitarian: the designer referenced nursing uniforms via panelled dresses, army-style thermals, and camouflage netting, some of which were realised using long-abandoned mass-production techniques.
"I don't really think about particular inspirations for particular collections. It's usually a world of references which is growing and developing and this was sort of the amalgamation of where they were at. A lot of looking at diving suits and uniforms and sort of seeing ways to take the details from that and bring it into a contemporary wardrobe, into an elevated context, trying to really focus on trying to make objects that feel desirable, wanting to be weared, trying to be fantasy but not too fantasy, somehow rooted in reality," Shinder told Culted post-show. "I think it's somehow a mix of different thoughts, but I want my work to feel somewhat continuing throughout collections. I don't like the idea of just a theme happening for each show, that's why I didn't do a title this season. In the past I've done titled collections, but I don't want to do titles anymore. I want to go forward with collections that all somehow just speak and continue to each other. It's also a more sustainable way of working for my creativity," he told Culted.
Loutre
German designer Olympia Schiele, the mind behind Loutre, has a background in photography and product design which often influences her collections. This season, she collaborated with Polish visual artist Helena Minginowicz, to whom Schiele credits as the inspiration behind the collection’s graduation from casual to tailored. “We had this amazing artist that I found in a gallery in Shoreditch half a year ago. And I contacted her about her work. She's the one who's been painting the face masks in our show this year that have been backcarried. And we just got an amazing conversation started. And even though we don't express ourselves in the same medium necessarily, we just kind of really connected over this idea of how personality shines through and how in different rooms, your personality might shift a bit and it develops differently. And like what that means for a person, whether you wear that or it wears you,” Schiele told Culted.
Images via Getty
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