Molly Goddard wanted to strip it back this season. Get to the heart of things. She wanted to make a show that was intimate, no fuss, honest, “simple and straightforward”, she described a few days before in a preview. “It felt like the right time to reign everything in.”
Last season, Molly’s show, staged in her usual venue of the Seymour Leisure Centre in Marylebone, was all about the unreplicable excitement and chaos of the fashion show as a medium, something you can’t capture in the flattened simplicity of a catwalk image, with models criss-crossing the hall in voluminous, brightly coloured dresses, walking in threes and fours to a symphony of UK Garage, post-punk and classical music.
So this season, Molly brought us into her studio. She’d painted the floor lemon yellow, filled it with wooden chairs, friends and family. She wanted to show in the space that the collection was made, not a show about the show, but about the clothes. The models walked out the door of the atelier into the space of the studio they use as a showroom. During the pandemic years they’d filmed their shows in here too.
“It’s where the collection comes together,” Molly explained of the decision to show in her studio. “It’s where we make the patterns, the toiles, the samples. And we decided pretty early on that we wanted to do it in the studio. It’s not necessarily a reaction to just what’s going on in fashion, but everything feels very manic, very mad, OTT, and I wanted to strip it down and remember what it is we do, why we do it, how we do it. This season is about the clothes, it’s about wearability.” It was a love letter to fashion too, in a way, with Molly and her stylist, Alice Goddard, reinterpreting garments they loved, used to own, used to wear, saw in magazines and desired.
Molly’s shows always have an intimacy to them though, no matter the scale of the show or the size of the dresses — they draw you into their world. Shown for a small audience of friends, family, journalists and buyers this time, it simply reinforced that. “The challenge this season was to keep everything pared back, it’s very easy for me to whip out a big dress, bright colours, I love doing that too, but it didn’t feel right. I don’t want to do it just for the show of it. I didn’t feel like that this season. I wanted it to be more slowed down. I want people to enjoy seeing carefully made clothes.”
And so there were none of the huge tulle dresses, instead it focussed on the more real, more wearable propositions Molly does so well, often inflected with a twist of clashing colours, textures, prints, mixing together leopard print, fair isle, ribbons, sophisticated knitwear, wool coats, blazers. “There’s a lot of practicality in the way things have been made, there’s a lot of transparency so you can see the construction and the cutting.”
There was a lot of talk during the pandemic, since consigned to memory, of fashion slowing down, reigning in its excesses and more ridiculous extravagances. “I love doing big shows, but you know our shows are tiny in comparison to most, but you get stuck on a treadmill of doing the same thing each season and not really thinking about why you do certain things.” This was really about fashion as fashion, the clothes, the way things are made, who they are made for, the memories we attach to garments.
Credits
Photography Ivan Ruberto