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there's something interesting happening
at the moment in the way that
male clothes are being presented
they're becoming more about a
celebration of the person wearing them
then they are this
rigid
formulaic way of dressing which has been
the history of menswear for the last 150
years
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originally i wanted to study women's
work because it was that time in the
late 90s but all the excitement was in
women's world
the change to menswear i think came
primarily when i went to work at louis
vuitton paris and i was working in the
men's department
that made me consider a male focused
view of fashion much more but as
i then started to work a few years later
on my own brand i started with very much
a menswear focus but i realized this
wasn't really expressing what i wanted
to express so now my approach really i
would say it was gender fluid even
though that's a term that i really
dislike
i think there's
a focus and a disregard for gender in my
work anything that i make is pretty much
intended to be worn by anyone who wants
to wear it of course you do have to take
into consideration body shapes and
sometimes there are parts of the body
that need to be accommodated and parts
that don't
but generally we really try to work on
clothes that can be worn by anyone
because in my opinion clothes don't have
a gender
so the construction on this dress which
is actually really a corset and a skirt
what we did was we followed as closely
as we could to
the original construction of a robelon
gliss but
fanned out trimmed in and re-mounted
this whole collar section so it could
fit a male torso
whilst at the same time keeping some of
these tight inward moving lines that
speak of something that is intrinsically
more feminine
to my mind a lot of what menswear is
about is
covering the body but what we wanted to
do here was actually celebrate the body
this expansion of decolletage this
emphasis on the form but then playing
with a contrasting volume
the skirt
which was quite a feat of engineering
is
very very tightly packed cartridge
pleats which are then mounted back onto
the
waistband in total i think there were 13
and a half meters of fabric within the
skirt
and something if we can find them that's
really gorgeous are these perfectly
patent matched pockets which were a bit
of a trial but
really nicely done in the end with
regards to how this was constructed it
is a really traditional bagged out and
boned bodice
and we laced it
in the fashion of the original robelon
glaze so you get this zigzagging knotted
at the top and the tie tucks back on
itself
this collection
specifically
was looking at the history of queer
spaces in london
focusing on the early 18th century
and
this idea of a continuous queer history
so it was really about a reclamation of
queerness a reclamation of
space
almost a demanding of attention
and taking a view
on queerness but through the lens of
beauty
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fundamentally
what's behind my work is the celebration
of the outsider
and i think that's hopefully a link to
the work of anna maria garthwaite who
was working in london in the 1730s and
40s
she was a textile designer selling her
work to weavers in spitalfields
it's really wonderful to see a
contemporary designer whose work is
really about textiles going back and
looking at our great textile designers
like anna maria garthwaite and drawing
inspiration from them and mixing that
with a range of references from
contemporary life
she was a prolific textile designer
producing up to 80 designs a year
and it's interesting that she's a single
woman in her 40s in london when she's
producing these designs and she's really
operating in a male-dominated industry
she starts with these very large bold
patterns and they become finer and finer
and that's something that we see in
other works by edward crutchley but in
this dress we see
an exaggeration of the large scale
designs that garfield was known for at
the beginning of her career
so the fabric design was very much
garthway inspired and
it's these very sinuous
lorex lines
that are woven in a bracato jacquard
with
recycled
polyester and within the design we also
added these very tone-on-tone jacquarded
logos which give a richness to the base
but also
the logo is quite an evident part of my
work so it's something that is a subtle
addition to a historical design
what i love about textiles is
it's the way that we
interact with fashion it's the thing
that is physically on our bodies and
for me it's the
most effective way to express your
identity but the geek inside me wants to
get inside and go okay so
this
which is a very direct reference to
anna maria garthwaite's work but what i
like about this historical referencing
is interposing it with things that are
very contemporary so here working with a
faceted nylon yarn to create this
liquidity
this weird plasticky sheen
next to something very historical
but then printing on
the lightest organic twill
in 100 silk
but then taking print
one step further onto something
really over the top
like this gold lorex on these big paper
bag trousers
and this mix of
something that feels very historical but
something that feels very contemporary
and actually outlandish in a way that
i think
anna maria garthwaite might have
approved of
my aim is perhaps to push
to perhaps to propose things that can't
be done but we can find a way to do them
but through this lens of something that
is very traditional
alongside that i also love technology so
i think there's always this push and
pull in my work between something that
is very craft based and something that
is very technology based
and where these areas intersect
i think is really exciting
i am well aware that this is not a
realistic proposition for people to wear
to the supermarket
but
what
i hope to achieve by showing this within
the realms of menswear
is the possibility
of what can be used in everyday life of
what people can wear
as we move forward as a society that
perhaps has less focus on gender
and is more about
how
the male body and people who wear
menswear can present themselves in a way
that feels
more conducive to self-expression
and more conducive to
a world where gender isn't as relevant
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you