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There is a sombre feeling at London Fashion Week this season, which is coinciding with a period of national mourning for Queen Elizabeth II. Most designers have scaled their shows back or, like Burberry, cancelled them altogether. For those that are going ahead—many young and fledgling designers who have invested considerable amounts to showcase their designs to an international fashion audience—a quiet, contemplative mood has replaced the usual frothy jubilance of the runway show.
Edward Crutchley, who showed his Spring Summer 23 offering the first morning of LFW, presciently named his collection “The Only Constant In Life Is Change”. Having trained under Kim Jones, Crutchley has a meticulous eye for tailoring, and S/S 23 married that precision with more glamorous and opulent elements than we’ve seen the young designer show preciously. Crutchley took as inspiration the Greek sea-god Proteus, collaborating with writer Aron Alexandros De Vallier Petridis, who studied ancient greek and archaeology, on the details of the collection.
“The ancient Greeks had an intricate relationship with the ever-changing sea. While a resource, a spring of power, the sea’s otherness, its every-changing unpredictable nature, brute force and indomitable will were feared,” De Vallier Petridis wrote in the show’s notes. “Perhaps, the only way to peacefully coexist with change is to be protean ourselves.” The word “protean”—or leaning in to change—is a prescient one in our current times. All of us can relate to the feeling of needing to surrender to the seemingly unending chaos of life in the last two years, but that feeling is particularly acute for young fashion designers, whose success tends to ebb and flow as trends as come and go.
Crutchley, however, has long been flowing in the right direction. Following his stints with Kim Jones at both Dior and Louis Vuitton, Crutchley launched his eponymous menswear label in 2015 to immediate acclaim, nabbing the prestigious International Woolmark Prize for menswear in 2019. Crutchley has since expanded his offering to include womenswear, and counts Kanye West, Supreme, and Richard Nicoll among the clients he has collaborated with and consulted for. S/S ’23, with its billowing cloqué jacquard gowns, light-refracting outerwear, and fabulous frill-sleeved mini dresses, proved one of his most confident outings to date. Proteanism suits him very well.
