The Top 10 Shows of London Fashion Week Fall 2019

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Photos: Getty Images; Gorunway.com; Corey Tenold

If the maelstrom of Brexit is paralyzing British government—and it certainly has been—the collective reaction of fashion designers has been to find the fortitude, flair, and frivolity to rise above it. On the final day of London Fashion Week, Richard Quinn pretty much summed up the zeitgeist of the city when he named his extravagantly beaded, operatically shaped ode to haute couture “Fearless Glamour.”

Concentrating on out-and-out creativity and coherence, with a flourish of doom-busting frivolity, proved to be a good plan for many. Grand, voluminous evening wear became a big thing at Erdem and Roksanda, and, in his own wonky, witchy way, at Matty Bovan, too. Simone Rocha’s gilded, sequined dresses glinted at the heart of a moving show, which addressed all ages and shapes of womankind.

Jonathan Anderson put it perfectly when he talked about wanting to “cut out the noise” to focus on fashion. In his case, that meant innovation tied to a new sophistication and interesting proportions—and wearable, too. Wearable! In London, we all felt a rehabilitation of that term taking place. Grace Wales Bonner’s outstanding menswear collection (with some looks for women) was inspired by black intellectuals and went deep on spiritual resonance—but it was also a considered, wearable collection. Victoria Beckham did her “wearable” in a grown-up, feminine way—punchy reds and great, simple combos of flares, tiny sweaters, and shirt collars—that kept women talking about it long after.

At Burberry, in a vast show, Riccardo Tisci reframed and upgraded his memories of ’90s London; it was an endorsement of the great street and club styles that helped raise morale the last time the British economy was down. The final words—congratulations—go to Hussein Chalayan, hero of the ’90s, who is very much in operation, selling his super-interesting clothes 25 years later. His anniversary collection was excellent.

Matty Bovan Fall 2019Photographed by Corey Tenold

Matty Bovan

Matty Bovan’s Liberty fabric–swathed crinolines, puffed sleeves, crocheted cobwebs, and squared-off knitwear shapes (sometimes reminiscent of domestic loose covers or rugs) mark him as a latter-day son of Vivienne Westwood. That’s fine—she’s a Northerner, too, and she gave Bovan a hearty personal benediction at his last show, praising his DIY craftiness and hailing him as a new punk. The idea of witchcraft spoke to him, as it had to Westwood, way back in the ’80s; in this case, it was after Bovan had been roaming Pendle Hill in Lancashire, the site of 17th-century accusations, trials, and hangings of women, England’s equivalent to the hysteria of the Salem witch trials. —Sarah Mower

JW Anderson Fall 2019Photographed by Corey Tenold

JW Anderson

Anderson’s JW Anderson collection has advanced leaps and bounds in terms of sophistication and grown-up-ness. Somehow these days he’s able to pull off both variety and coherence. He can do exaggeration and drama—such as the huge, Cardin-like wraparound jacket—and a quietly chic gray cape with equal skill. But when it comes down to it, the showcasing of his perfectly tailored mannish-feminine trousers is what really had his audience walking on air. Anderson showed how, with that one purchase, a woman could get something she's able to throw on for day with any jacket or coat, then pair with a superbly chic, asymmetrically draped tunic for evening. For all the elaborate fashion that is going on today, it’s really the simplest, most practical pieces of design that turn out to be the things women respond to in droves. —S.M.

Burberry Fall 2019Photo: Getty Images

Burberry

Riccardo Tisci isn’t overtly a political animal, but past the opening of layered rugby shirts, some of his incitements for a new kind of youth style came with coded references to ’90s anti-establishment phases of rave and deconstruction. There were Vivienne Westwood–like corseted tops (she’s a heroine he’s already collaborated with) pulled on over a polo shirt, a stretch cycling dress, or tracksuit bottoms. Some of the boys’ bomber jackets and the girls’ dresses and coats were embedded with what looked like beer-bottle tops. A grunge moment came glammed up in sequined, corseted lingerie layered over a white T-shirt. There were upside-down attachments of padded jackets on tweed suits and camel Crombies—a chopped-up knack that John Galliano brought to fashion back in the day. And was that a reverb of Oasis-versus-Blur Brit-pop style when Tisci sent out a lad wearing a Union Jack flag billowing from the back of his black puffer coat? —S.M.

Simone Rocha Fall 2019Photographed by Corey Tenold

Simone Rocha

As pretty and compellingly wearable as Rocha’s clothes are—and this season’s casting went further than ever to underline that—there was something dark lurking within her research. On one level, she said it came from viewing the work of film director Michael Powell, who made The Red Shoes, and from his controversial horror movie Peeping Tom, about a voyeuristic cameraman/serial killer who murders women as he films them. (The 1960 movie’s sadistic content was regarded as so outrageous that it was banned for a long time, and it effectively ended Powell’s career.) On another level, the collection was an acknowledgement of Rocha’s formative attachment to the work of Louise Bourgeois, whose themes were also a startlingly honest struggle between tenderness and sexuality, often expressed in fabrics and textiles. “I found her series of weavings, which she’d made with fabric from her own clothes, particularly beautiful,” the designer said. —S.M.

Wales Bonner Fall 2019Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com

Wales Bonner

The cerebral, imaginative reading that Grace Wales Bonner has been doing made her want to concentrate the collection on African intellectualism. “I was inspired by black intellectual dress at Howard University, the first black university, and I started looking through a lot of yearbooks and identifying a lot of items, like a mac or a varsity jacket, and a specific type of wider tailoring,” she said. “So it’s actually quite American, but then I’m trying to imbue this classic framework, but with this sense of magic that comes from another place. Voodoo jewelry feathers.” —S.M.

Erdem Fall 2019Photographed by Corey Tenold

Erdem

There were bubble dresses and bows galore, sweeping trains and gleaming, ostrich-feathered embroideries. Where were the English ’60s? Maybe in the hints of Mary Quant’s early use of groovy lace tights, tweeds, and kinky leather boots. The innocent, virginal fashion for upstanding frilly collars had a lovely moment in a white chiffon tiered dress with a row of black velvet ribbons. Erdem Moralioglu added in the story of an Italian princess who wore her jewels on the insides of her jackets at one point, and who ordered a wedding dress covered in black roses, out of respect for her deceased father. Richness, gorgeousness, formality, and a touch of darkness—it was a character-led Erdem fantasy at its best. —S.M.

Roksanda Fall 2019Photo: Getty Images

Roksanda

The real takeaway from Roksanda for next season was the strength of the day clothes, from the oversize, tunic-like shirts—a recurring London theme—in vivid hues worn with trousers cut with a gentle curve to one knockout piece of outerwear after another, with wadded silk print scarves worn over a capacious jacket or coat that was then secured with a belt to the gleaming, color-blocked, nipped-waist parkas. On exiting the show, a colleague, clearly impressed, said, “Just when you thought you’d seen every variation on a parka….” So, there you go Roksanda: another convert to the cause. —Mark Holgate

Victoria Beckham Fall 2019Photographed by Corey Tenold

Victoria Beckham

Since she’s come back to show on home ground, in London, there’s been something less clinical and more approachable about what Victoria Beckham does with her ready-to-wear. It hardly warrants a conceptual narrative to interpret this: She puts together flattering shapes and combinations of color that are persuasively easy to wear—and all the more persuasive if she wears them herself, because there are millions of women and girls who hang on her every press appearance and Instagram story. —S.M.

Richard Quinn Fall 2019Photo: Getty Images

Richard Quinn

Richard Quinn has made his studio in Peckham something of a laboratory for print innovation (he’s opened up the facilities to students as well as to his fashion peers), though, judging by the range of couture-led shapes—buoyant puffball ball skirts and billowing trapeze coats—he’s reaching for dizzying new technical heights. And if marabou feathers have indeed usurped sequins as fashion’s embellishment of choice, then Quinn’s jaw-dropping feathered bridal look took that idea to its chicest conclusion. It was a fitting way to close the show, as well as the week, which has been marked by some terrific fashion. Though the shadow of Brexit looms large over the nation’s future, young British designers like Quinn continue to flourish. —Chioma Nnadi

Chalayan Fall 2019Photo: Getty Images

Chalayan

With Chalayan, you get a lot to chew on, but there was plenty of highly digestible fare at the show. The performative aspect of Hussein Chalayan’s funny vogue-hands headpieces was a moment of clever comedy, but of more interest to his customers were the dresses that overlaid corsetry upon obliquely cut evening wear in leather or fabric, which sometimes featured the D-ringed puckers of suspender straps. The precise folding and gathering in many of these pieces were reflected in the furled clutches, whose irregular shape vaguely resembled drips of candle wax. —Luke Leitch