London Fashion Week loves to typecast its designers, and while many of them have carved out niches in various corners of fashion design, it inevitably feels claustrophobic to be put in a box. As the city’s masters of print, Peter Pilotto and Christopher de Vos have had a particularly big box to fill every season, so it wasn’t so weird that for spring/summer 15 they decided to break out. “We wanted to elevate the craft and push it beyond the print, and find our own special effect by using uncommon materials and techniques and finding new ways of layering the textiles, the colours, the embroidery, the cyber florals,” Peter said after the show.
Looking at it, the print effect we associate with the designers was very much there, but it wasn’t necessarily prints as much as it was patterns: all kinds of materials combined to create the print effect. Some garments seemed entirely constructed from fixed materials rather than soft, taking embellishment to a whole new level. This was when Pilotto and de Vos hit the nail of the head in terms of their psychedelic influence – “Jimi Hendrix, festival goers, the desert,” as Christopher said – because some garments literally looked so unbelievably pieced together that became trippy to the eye. “There was a shine and something that wasn’t achievable just through prints,” Christopher noted, underlining the duo’s willingness, courage and capability to move beyond the design feature that’s made them star designers.
Credits
Text Anders Christian Madsen
Photography Piczo