It seems like a dangerous thing to say for a designer, but before the Dunhill show John Ray divulged that he was "more interested in the boy than what he's wearing. The clothes are almost secondary." But, given that his latest collection was based around strong personalities, his comment made sense. Ray found his starting point in 1950s and '60s Soho, where painters such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney mingled and got drunk (mainly got drunk) alongside the aristocracy and the financial and political elite. By casting contemporary creative Londoners—like the artists Guy Gormley and Cosmo Macdonald, musician Gwilym Gold, and "flaneur" Otis Ferry—the designer sought to underscore a point about character and freedom. "The dressing is random, haphazard, but these artists all had the sophisticated touch. There's just the thing added that makes it work," he explained.
The bulk of the show was built around a casual look, quite far from what has previously been associated with Dunhill. Pants were loose-fitting and often rolled up, while plush knits had an almost painterly, brushlike color effect. Corduroy, that fabric of the casually inclined, featured heavily. The silhouette had also been lifted from the more generous cuts seen in images of 1950s Soho. There was a dose of Richard Burton in the 1959 movie Look Back in Anger. The most fabulous moment of the collection was easily identifiable: the salmon pajamas and alpaca coat—a look so chilled out, you felt like immediately adopting it as a uniform; it was the perfect "just popping out to get the milk, darling" outfit. To hammer home the point, Ray sent out three more pajama looks, one with the model wearing a blanket with an old Alfred Dunhill ad turned into a print (blankets apparently being the new favorite item of luxury houses).
This could easily have been a clichéd, retro-tinged collection—Hockney, especially, has been mined to the point of boredom—but the designer used proportion and color in a way that made the clothes look, if not contemporary, then certainly dynamic. Ray has said the essence of Dunhill is about escape, and it is now clear that escape can take different forms. Soho used to be where borders became fuzzy and sexuality more fluid, and in such a place it is perhaps true that the clothes are secondary. Frankly, you're too busy being alive to care too much.
