Giles Deacon said he had imagined a party thrown by Lady Ottoline Morrell when he was coming up with his first couture collection. Morrell was a flamboyantly dressed British literary hostess of the 1920s and ’30s whose friends included Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Dora Carrington, Bertrand Russell, and Stanley Spencer—individualists and free thinkers all. Deacon’s collection itself represents a personal artistic breakaway from convention, too; he has put his ready-to-wear line on hold and decided to follow his heart and concentrate on couture. “I always enjoyed making the big, special pieces for the show, and those were the things we were selling, so I thought, why not do what you love most?”
He had filled two salons on an upper floor on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris with an eclectic collection of the eveningwear silhouettes he’s built up as his signatures in London since he launched his collection in 2004. Hugely voluminous gowns in vibrantly colored fabrics and prints stood next to tiny dresses covered in 3-D petals, mixed with a smattering of tailored 18th-century–jacketed pantsuits. All of it is created in his studio off Brick Lane in London’s East End, with textiles like blue and white shibori prints and others made by Deacon’s own hand—there was a super-enlarged green-on-pink pattern of a drawing of kelp, for example—and brocades from the Gainsborough silk company, whose damasks are woven in Suffolk on 19th-century looms. They are entrance-making things for confident women. Without naming names, Deacon declared, “They come to us from all over: Hong Kong, North Yorkshire, America. There’s a High Court judge from Washington, D.C., who really enjoys dressing up. A brilliant woman!”
From the point of view of a client, it’s rewarding to be able to have a relationship with a dressmaker who is as happy as Deacon is to tweak his designs for customers, and who will make it as fun an experience as he does. His enthusiastic affability is very much part of his attraction, and for Americans, the maelstrom of events still spinning out from Brexit does at least make the work of this very English designer even more worth considering, since the exchange-rate value of the dollar against the pound has shot up.
