Another look at fashion week, and the Off schedule shows are proving just as crowd pulling this season, with both Jacob Kimmie and Jasper Garvida packed out to capacity.
After running up seemingly endless stairs we arrived just in time for Jacob Kimmie’s Pilgrim collection. Vauxhall fashion Scout is again this season at Freemasons Hall, and the ornate rooms used for the catwalks made for an original setup, with the models parading through two rooms. A strictly monochrome palette, featuring filigree style jewellery and face masks, was strongly linked to a theme of life and death, with long veils and dresses in both black and white. We saw extremely chunky knit, this season seems to have gone back to the chunkier the better, and again leather gloves and arm warmers. The apparent life and death theme was strongly reinforced when the finale look came out dresses head to toe in white carrying a baby, also clad in white. This met murmurs of both success and disapproval, though definitely caused a stir as everybody left discussing it.
Straight onto Jasper Garvida, downstairs in the Freemasons hall. This collection, ‘Venus’, had a strong link to Art Deco, with architectural tailoring and structural pieces, a green geometrical print holding some sections of the collection together, although on the whole it seemed quite disjointed. Again we saw leather gloves and detailing, along with cashmere and plenty of sequins in every imaginable style. With a very Deco palette of dark forest green, greys black and some soft pink, the selection of both long and short dresses with deep v-cut backs and tailoring was renminiscent of the 20’s glamour, with very gangster-speak-easy- like feel from black trilby hats tipped to one side and bright red lipstick.