Corsets, activist knitwear and extreme femininity at Fashion East AW19

For AW19, London’s Fashion East incubator — known for fostering talents such as Kim Jones, Charles Jeffrey, and Grace Wales Bonner — gave a platform to emerging womenswear designers with a strong desire to challenge established fashion codes. Charlotte Knowles and Yuhan Wang brought powerful visions of future femininity to the catwalk, while newcomer Gareth Wrighton presented an inflammatory anti-fashion debut. From start to finish, each designer toyed with clothing’s perception and established meanings: lingerie as feminist armour, DIY knitwear as a political platform, kawaii frills as an antidote to the male gaze. Nothing was as it seemed — a zeitgeist reaction to our post-truth world.

Gareth Wrighton

Gareth Wrighton’s AW19 collection was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Altamont Speedway Free Festival in California, when the killing of Meredith Hunter signalled a brutal end to the Summer of Love. Driven by an activist approach, Wrighton imagines what America’s future museum curators might select as folk iconography that represents our current troubled era. Crew neck jumpers were emblazoned with burnt orange hues of wildfires, and knitwear boasted Chelsea Manning’s Wiki-leaked footage. Meanwhile, bulletproof Kevlar fabric, empty shotgun shells and shredded backpacks eerily referenced US mass shootings. The Central Saint Martins’ graduate’s critical approach has developed since his final project The Maul, a video game featuring zombie models in a post-apocalyptic mall, which poked fun at mindless fast-fashion. For this more mature offering, the designer has created one-off balaclavas and custom sweaters with slogans like “Excessive Consumption May Cause Laxative Effects”. Inspired by “the poetry of creating an entire single garment from one length of yarn with little-to-no waste,” he taught himself how to sew via YouTube tutorials and library books. Beautiful knitwear woven with hard messaging offers a welcome juxtaposition to an industry obsessed with image over anything else. But will the ‘fash pack’ see anything beyond bright-hued skinny jumpers? Let’s wait and see. 

Yuhan Wang

“Softness is power — we don’t need to dress like men,” asserts Chinese designer Yuhan Wang, whose second collection at Fashion East celebrated a Rococo vision of femininity. Delicate tea dresses cut from lace, tulle and velvet evoked Victorian and Edwardian undergarments in a manner that is both elegant and deliciously playful. Wang artfully employs ruches and gathers to give a luxurious dimension to her garments. Meanwhile, lace ribbons, crochet flowers, and knicker-like fabric cover guillotine shoes, giving an extra dainty touch to already her whimsical looks. Wang’s unapologetically feminine representation of women is, lest-we-forget, closer to Harujuku street style then Topshop’s high street fashion, and it’s exactly her opposition to the mainstream sexualisation of women in contemporary fashion that makes it so appealing. Her dreamy palette of cornflower blue, lilac, pea green, and primrose yellow is informed by watercolour illustrations of Victorian women, rather than fashion forecasting agency WGSN’s harsh trend-led neons — Wang even took up painting herself to create a cartoonish rose print adorning a silk midi dress. This personal sensibility, refined season after season — to the point the Fashion East team have been spotted wearing her garments day-to-day — is a testament to her skill as a designer, and knowledge of what women want to wear and how they want to feel. In December, Wang’s talent was further solidified when Marni recruited her as a junior designer. It’s safe to say, buyers and press, can’t wait to see how Wang’s practice will evolve.

Charlotte Knowles

For her Fashion East finale — this will be the last time she will be presenting as part of the incubator — Charlotte Knowles showcased another empowering vision of femininity that contrasted the aesthetics of silky, smooth lingerie with body armour-like outerwear. Her trademark minimally boned-corsetry, industrial belting, and utilitarian fanny pack hybrids were twined with a sensual exploration of natural and manmade fibres, including an aggressive alpaca-Lycra mix. New for AW19 was sharp form-fitting tailoring, with heritage checks appearing across wools, and hyper-sexualised push-up bras refashioned as bombastic puffer jackets. Elsewhere, the absurdity of feminine caricatures was pushed to the extreme via absurdly small cardigans. The Charlotte Knowles woman has previously been described as “beautiful but terrifying,” and this season the designer was not shy about upping the ante, characterising her femme as “a threat to the established order” and “culturally constructed codes of femininity”. Knowles — with her mission to represent sexiness from a female designer’s viewpoint, and experience working on the reboot of minimal label Helmut Lang with Hood By Air’s Shayne Oliver — takes garments perceived to be worn by someone in their most vulnerable state, weaponising them to be worn fiercely in the street.

All images courtesy of Fashion East. Copyright Chris Yates.