“I love clashing prints, clashing colours, and clashing textures,” Molly Goddard explained backstage after her SS23 show, distilling this raucous and riotous show down to those juxtapositions. The models came out in groups of twos and threes, criss-crossing the Seymour Leisure Centre’s main hall in different directions, overlapping with each other in intricate loops of the show space. The aim, Molly said, was to create an immersive show experience, something slightly unrecreateable in the endless scroll of images and catwalk look slideshows. It was about the experience of watching a show, that sensory overload of music and colour and people.
But also, and as always with Molly, it was about how people may wear her designs IRL. And so there was a rugged reality to the opening looks, pretty dresses worn over jeans and with cowboy boots, or with a simple T-shirt — the clash here was about the contrast between silhouette and material too.
“The cowboy boots were one of the first things Alice and I worked on when we started the collection,” Molly explained, “We always do lots of styling days where we just put together lots of pieces from old seasons with new things we’re working on and just create silhouettes from my drawings. And the cowboy boots started there.”
The show was roughly split into four sections, demarcated by changes in music and subtle shifts in the silhouettes and colour, with each section the dresses getting bigger and brighter, culminating with a huge, white dress, so voluminous it was almost spherical.
“I wanted the sections to have a bit of a clunkiness to them and a messiness, and to kind of just slow down the pace of the show a bit, to give everything a little bit more breathing room,” Molly said. Although it felt organic, too, which has always been one of Molly’s strengths as a designer. Those clashes — bright oranges and pinks, neon greens, printed denims and cosy cardigans and the show-stopping tulle extravagences — combine to form their own perfect world. For example: the show opened and closed with three looks in the same shade of milky white, although each trio of looks pushing in different directions, and so showing the conceptual variety of Molly’s designs, the multiplicity of ways these dresses can be worn.
This extended to the music, which spanned from the symphonic to post-punk and UK garage, with elements of each repeating, overlapping, being recalled. “It needed to be messy and jump around,” Molly said. “I didn’t want it to be perfect.”
But really the standout was the colours, and the construction of the garments in service to them. “Colours are not kind of something that comes later. It’s very much at the beginning of the design process,” Molly said. A series of sheer neon slips were one highlight, a layered luscious red tulle top over a soft lavender tulle skirt another, the silhouette had an echo in another look, this time paired with a bright neon green cardigan.
Much of this was about how things are made, as well as how they are worn, and how fabric is used. “I love making things in calico,” Molly said, “and we make loads of toiles and I always think everything looks amazing like that. So we found a fabric that was like calico – but obviously much nicer – and we worked with that. We wanted you to really be able to see the cutting and the silhouette.”
In the press release Molly noted that she wanted to capture the mood of “people out of to have fun” but it is Molly’s clothes that summon that mood, bringing joy to a Saturday afternoon in London.
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Images via Spotlight