London Fashion Week must be fabulous, it’s what HM would want

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Evening Standard
Paul Flynn16 September 2022
WEST END FINAL

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At the start of this week, I began noticing the twice-yearly influx of models hanging around the lobby of a boutique hotel I live next door to. The appearance of these astonishing looking, svelte and limber figures is the first real evidence London Fashion Week is upon us. It’s five days when the city can claim to be the most beautiful in the world, with the best surgery and handbags. Like Frieze Week, without the icy artworld froideur.

For a second there, it looked like LFW wouldn’t happen. The day after the Queen’s death, British icon Burberry and then visiting Belgian fashion dignitary Raf Simons cancelled their London shows, setting off a flurry of social discourse about what Her Majesty would’ve actually wanted the fashion industry to do in the event of her death.

As if we didn’t have enough evidence already. At the age of 91, she set off an Instagram volcano by attending Richard Quinn’s AW/2018 show, nodding approvingly from the front row at clothes made by a supremely talented young designer only two years out of Central St Martins. Her appearance had real world consequences in the inauguration of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design. Quinn was its first recipient.

No matter how many times  you reiterate how important fashion is to British industry and creativity — not to mention how innate it is to London’s proud sense of itself — it will still be dismissed by some. Unlike  the City, the fashion industry’s trickle-down effect can be seen and shared, making Liz Truss’s astonishing decision to lift the cap of bankers’ bonuses the day before LFW tin-eared in more than one regard.

What occurs on the London catwalk over the next few days will be quickly imitated by the high street. An ideas factory for the few becomes design practise for the many. When Prada caused retail shockwaves with its bestselling chunky headband several seasons ago, Claire’s Accessories had their own take on it, for cheapskates like Truss and her old pal Nadine Dorries to scrap over. Everyone’s a winner.

Fashion is both elite and street. It is Harrods and thrift store. Over LFW we’ll see old punks and new ravers present momentous new ideas that will ripple across culture. Fashion is an interdisciplinary, visionary industry. It is romance and elegance, vulgarity and ridicule. LFW is the Christmas of Fabulous. No city captures it quite like London during the five-day circus.

When Raf Simons said he was showing in London for the first time, there was a  buzz of excitement. His presence will be missed, taking some of the heft out of an occasion which struggles to be heard in the news cycle.

But LFW is about small cottage industries as well as the big boys. It is Fashion East introducing us to the kids taking radical shapes from nightlife to shop rail, Harris Reed, pictured, making his bid for stardom. So, for SS/2023, let’s shout louder and clap harder for our young design heroes. It’s what she would’ve wanted.

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Uncoupled

Towards the end of Darren Star’s Sex and The City for gays, Uncoupled, I had a horrifying realisation. This is the tale of a swishy fifty-something New York realtor in a Long-Term Relationship who endlessly brunches and says “twink” every other sentence. His pristine life falls apart when his handsome partner wakes up to the ghastly shallowness of their life, realises how awful they are and leaves him at his own surprise 50th birthday. Cue our “hero” finding Grindr, learning new a gay vocabulary and embarking on the journey of discovery that is single life. As a 51-year-old LTR gay, it was always going to be a tough watch. It’s like walking through some twisted, horrifying hall of gay mirrors where you think the characters are versions of all the most dreadful gays you’ve ever met, until you realise that, yup, there is a sliver of you in there, too. Only richer. A little piece of me dies with every passing episode. I’m obsessed, obviously.

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