As a new show celebrates the city as a hotbed of radical design, emerging talent faces increasingly tough conditions in which to build a brand
In 1994, Dawn Mello, then president of New York luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman, travelled to London to attend the city’s fashion week for the first time in five years. Mello was lured back to the city by the promise of trailblazing new names, including Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Antonio Berardi, the first designers to pique her interest since John Galliano’s debut nine years earlier.
Thirty years later, McQueen and Galliano’s names are still drawing people to London. “A friend of mine told me, ‘You should check out this London school — it is where McQueen and Galliano went’,” says designer Chet Lo, recalling how he came to the decision to move from New York to London to study at Central Saint Martins art school in 2015.
“It was a no-brainer: it was the top school and also the cheapest option,” says Lo, who graduated with a BA in knitwear in 2020, and now runs his eponymous label in the city. He stayed because of the community of peers that he found, and because of London’s extensive support programmes for emerging designers. “There are so many schemes to help kids who don’t know how to start a brand,” he says.
Lo’s experience encapsulates what has made London a magnet for young design talent over the past three decades. Christopher Breward, a fashion historian and director of National Museums Scotland, says the city has an openness to creativity, innovation and rebelliousness that stretches back to the Swinging Sixties and the music and fashion subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s. It is in those decades that London became known as a centre for “anti-fashion fashion”, a place bursting with art, music and spaces for experimentation.
This spirit is celebrated in Rebel: 30 Years of London Fashion, an exhibition opening at the Design Museum in Kensington on September 16. It looks at London’s impact on the global fashion scene as well as the city’s spaces that have been catalysts for designers, from its art schools and studios to its nightclubs and show venues.
“One of the really important elements of a thriving fashion ecology in a city is the culture of the city, which has to be authentic, has to be affordable, but also has to be an avant-garde culture, something that is pushing at the boundaries,” says Breward. “Through the 1980s and 1990s it was really club culture that was driving ideas and inspiration [in London].”
That atmosphere spilled over into the following two decades. Designers who studied in London in the first decade of the 2000s recall a city bursting with energy and opportunities. “At that point, London fashion was really kicking off, but also the music scene was amazing — there were great clubs, great energy, so many new things happening,” remembers Scottish fashion designer Christopher Kane, who graduated from CSM in 2006. “It propelled people like me. People were really looking out for new talent, new creativity.”
Designer Jonathan Saunders, who graduated from CSM in 2002, describes a climate of comradeship that allowed many to thrive, notwithstanding their means. “A lot of us, we didn’t come from rich families and we didn’t have huge investments in the early stages — we grew our businesses from nothing,” he says. “We swapped designers and manufacturers, we talked to each other about how we kept it together, we shared fabric mills, we shared venues. We weren’t fighting over each other’s market; we were trying to make our own market.”
Internationally, London fashion remains renowned for its youthfulness and avant-garde styles, more so than Milan, Paris or New York. “No other country seems to have a mix of imagination, original thought and lyrical vision,” observes fashion critic Suzy Menkes, who has been covering British fashion since the late 1960s.
Many credit London’s fashion schools — which focus on developing the expression of individualism and identity over technical skills (a process Lo sums up as: “They break you down to your bare bones and then they build you back up”) — with the achievement of this reputation.
Likewise, many recognise the contribution of early-stage support schemes such as the British Fashion Council’s Newgen (established in 1993), Fashion East (2000) and the Sarabande Foundation (2006), which provide funding, financial training and mentorship for emerging designers.
But today’s students and young designers operate in a city and a fashion system that have changed radically. London has become increasingly gentrified, with studio rents becoming unaffordable and university fees increasing. There are fewer spaces for experimentation and the city’s club scene has dwindled.
Higher fees and costs are making designers risk averse, says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “The debt-laden students that come out of university today are more likely to get a job at Burberry than set up their own business,” he says.
The emergence of social media has given designers new tools to build their brands and communicate with new audiences, but it has also heightened competition for space and attention. Brands of all sizes are now expected to operate on a global stage, where labels owned by luxury conglomerates such as LVMH, Richemont and Kering dominate.
Brexit has also made conditions more difficult for businesses. Designers lament an increase in logistics and shipping costs, and challenges in selling to continental European stores, with the addition of a 12 per cent tariff on most fashion goods exports to the EU plus VAT. Procurement of raw materials from the EU has also become more expensive, with some fabrics and yarns requiring the payment of up to 8 per cent and 4 per cent duty respectively.
Since the end of free movement in December 2020, fewer EU students have enrolled at UK universities and fewer workers from the continent have been employed in Britain’s manufacturing sector. Designers say access to talent, from design assistants to skilled artisans and manufacturers, has been made more difficult.
“Import duties, extra taxes, the [declining] footfall of fashion week, it’s all to do with Brexit,” says Charles Jeffrey, creative director of Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, a brand that was founded in London in 2015 but now shows in Milan, where it also has its showroom. “People are not feeling as excited about the UK.”
Adam Mansell, chief executive of the UK Fashion and Textile Association, describes Brexit as “an unmitigated disaster for the fashion industry”. “Pre-Brexit London was the place where you wanted to establish a fashion business. That’s no longer the case,” he says. “The reality is that people are looking at other European cities as places to go and start up businesses, because it’s so much easier to trade within Europe than it is to trade from the UK to Europe.”
Is all lost for London fashion? “At the moment no one should start a fashion business, but London is a great place to do it if you are going to take the risk,” says designer Priya Ahluwalia, who founded her label Ahluwalia in 2018. Saunders, who is now based in New York, where he leads a design studio and creative agency, agrees. “London is set up to support independent brands and the industry there, from editorial to retail, has a culture of supporting newness,” he says.
Vogue critic Sarah Mower, who guest-curated the exhibition at the Design Museum, has faith in the city’s resilience. “The reason that London has thrived in the past 30 years despite a lot of economic and financial and political ups and downs, is that it’s a very open city,” she says. The hope is that it will continue to be so, providing space — culturally and economically — for creatives to thrive.
‘Rebel: 30 Years of London Fashion’ runs from September 16 to February 11 2024, designmuseum.org
Source: Financial Times
