A few months ago, Sleek met the contenders for this year’s Designer For Tomorrow award (the initiative operated by Peek & Cloppenburg and helmed by Marc Jacobs) at an intimate event in Berlin, where the 5 young designers – Leandro Cano, Ramil Makinano, Siddhartha Anselm Meyer, Camilla Salgaard Nielsen and Laura Williams all showed one piece as Mr Jacobs talked about their talent and explained how hard it was whittling the entries down to just five from the 350 the competition received. After last night’s catwalk show, it wasn’t difficult to share his anguish, as each of the five sent models down the runway wearing a series of looks from the respective collections, in what was a terrific display of new fashion vision, as diverse as it was impressive.
In the end there could only be one winner though, and last night proved to be the moment for the Seville-based designer Leandro Cano, who dispatched girls down the catwalk in a range of directional, extravagant and occasionally rather odd dresses. Naturally, Marc Jacobs was there in person – and in his trademark skort – to do the and-the-winner-is envelope-opening thing and the presentation of the gong.
It’s hardly to question the New York designer’s taste, but for Sleek’s money, Laura Williams’ radical, witty collection of crotcheted knitwear, high-visibility fabrics and mutated adventure-wear – the kind of thing you’d throw on if you wanted to bring glamour to camping, or head off on a shopping trip to, say, Antarctica – was the standout, while props have to go to Ramil Makinano’s collection of daring prints in the most vibrant of colour combinations, and Siddhartha Anselm Meyer’s collection of outrageously de- and re-constructed menswear.
There was a cocktail after the show in the China Club, not far from the BFW Tent, where last year’s winner Alexandra Kiesel confessed to Sleek that Siddhartha Anselm Meyer was her fave. Leandro Cano was visibly overcome by his win, and if the other four aspiring designers looked a little deflated, they can at least reassure themselves that there are 345 other designers who didn’t make the Marc Jacobs grade, and get quite as far as they had.