Where mid-century countercultural factions are concerned, you’d be hard-pressed to find one cooler than the teddy girls, the unsung but arguably more compelling female counterparts to the well-documented teddy boys. It was photographer Ken Russell’s snaps of them, in all of their tousled, idiosyncratic glamour, that inspired Jenna Wilson and Cary Vaughan’s Fall outing. It’s an improbable marriage, perhaps—the teddy girls’ shoestring riffs on Edwardian aesthetics combined with the palpably crafty woven-cotton gauzes that are Ace & Jig’s signature—but one that yielded charming results.
The reference was most felt in dandyish touches like the tie-neck blouses, puff sleeves, and high Victorian necklines; ditto tailoring done à la Ace & Jig (charming little vests; cropped jackets; and wide-leg, paper bag–waist trousers). Some Lurex- and chenille-laced fabrications paid homage to the foppishness of the ’70s. Most commendable was the way that Wilson and Vaughan made the reference work for them; on the heels of plenty of heavily retro-inflected Fall collections, Ace & Jig paid its girl-gang icons tribute in a fitting, unaffected way.
