Something of the sixties keeps bobbing up on the runways this season. It was there at Prada and Rochas, and now—not entirely surprisingly, since it's often the designer's beat—at Giles, giant beehives and all. This time, Giles Deacon found his way into it by looking at the work of the contemporary Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf. The designer said he was aiming to catch the spirit of "slightly disconsolate girls who might be from the sixties—or somewhere in the future. Or maybe on a starship."
If it didn't count as one of the season's more rigorous work-throughs of sci-fi and sixties themes, it gave Deacon the excuse to crush some of Fall's trends together: a palette of browns and orange, A-line skirts, cropped versions of winter's new flares, metallic brocade gathered short skirts, and a shearling jacket. The last had a big collar styled (if you looked at it one way) like an Apollo-mission space suit. Toy-shaped handbags—a gonk and a gremlin—made for Deacon by Katie Hillier, and funny metal "cloud" headdresses by Stephen Jones gave a spoofy cartoonish spin. Still, there's a sense that Deacon is having a harder time attracting attention among the Paris competition than in his native London. This season, to get the slot he wanted, he went off-schedule, causing a certain amount of disruption to the first night of the Paris shows.
