London Fashion Week – Jonathan Saunders

London Fashion Week over the years has been lambasted over the grander Paris, Milan and New York weeks; in the past couple of years there have been many breakout designers choosing to base themselves right here in London. It also pays to remember that Many of Fashion’s greatest designers are English and started showing at London; Stella McCartney, John Galliano, Matthew Williamson, Hussein Chalayan, Christopher Bailey and of course Alexander McQueen. The British designer is behind most of the powerful fashion houses around the world and this makes London a crèche for the future A-list designers. Over the years we have watched in amazement as the styles of Giles, Gareth Pugh, Christopher Kane and Jonathan Saunders have been gradually honed to create certain signatures. So London Fashion Week is now firmly on the fashion calendar, no more to be ignored by the likes of Anna Wintour and co. So it is with great sadness that we must say adieu to Jonathan Saunders, who moves to New York next season. He has been known over the years as a prints man, and his final collection in London (for the foreseeable future) featured sombre lacklustre colours and not a print in sight, a sign of how he feels leaving London?

Colour blocking in a mature manner was the name of the game in this collection with Saunders using diluted blues and yellows to create a very grownup colour palette. Somehow the lightness of the colours created a filmic quality to the blacks, lightening them as well.

Sheer fabrics (yes we know, the fabric of the season) were used in an interestingly new way, rather then veiling (also in the collection but not to the scale as we’ve been seeing in other collections) Jonathan Saunders created dynamically changing blocks of colour, found in the blue sleeves below which change colour as the fabric moves. Not only has Saunders created a new form of veiling, he’s created a new colour blocking method.

In our introduction to London Fashion Week we talked about Matisse and his Papier Collier method of collage, which really does appear to have come into this collection through pockets and blocks of colour, appearing to literally be ‘stuck on’, creating a strangely modern effect, whilst being detailed as a whole it is paradoxically minimalist.

Whilst Jonathan may be moving to New York, clearly a bit of that ‘New York state of mind’ has already entered Jonathan’s, with this very New York strapless dress which could have gone down a De La Renta runway just as much as Jonathan’s.

Whilst another interesting sub-trend were the long sleeved dresses, which we also saw at Proenza Schouler. These dresses are a little more difficult to pull off but if done well, they can create an interestingly gothy feel to them, making them perhaps targets for the younger women. Difficult to pull off, but when they work they’re cute and quirky.

The designs continued to have the same airy quality to them (mostly without the use of any see-thru fabrics) thanks to the use of the languid colour palette; colour blocking in the look below made it go from a simple silhouette to something much more refined.

Yet it was certainly not just about colour, with the designer experimenting with interesting new shapes to classic silhouettes, through fluctuating volumes. Such as in this T-shirt dress, broken up by colour blocking and made three dimensional through the cloud-like detailing; just enough not to be overwhelming whilst still keeping the look individual and stylish.

Saunders even experimented with corseting in the collection, with this strapless number. Pay attention to the flat squares in the bust and the uneven diagonal cut of the lower part of the dress.

This season has been all about the simple dress, and one silhouette in particular really came through, the goddess dress. Jonathan naturally had a few in this collection and the one below seems to tick off all the main themes of the show, colour blocking (tick), playful volumes (tick) and water colour palette (tick)

Yet perhaps the most exportable part of Saunders’s line is his eveningwear pieces like this goddess dress with gradient detailing and edged with black

Or this look with that looks like one of Clifford Still’s tears of black

After seeing this collection it isn’t hard to see why the designer is moving to New York as he certainly has a grip of the sportswear mentality. Several of these dresses could have been shown on a New York runway very easily (by this we mean they could have been bought not only by a single fashion tribe (the ladies who lunch), but also by the more experimental US tribes), so what the designer is doing is very clever. His collection is slowly Americanizing yet keeping to Jonathan’s principles and signatures and with some of that quirky off-the-wall English humour through experimentation. It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out over time. Next we’ll be looking at Paul Smith’s quirky British collection.