There's a truism about the malleability of memory that each time you try to tell a story from your past, it's bound to come out slightly differently. That's definitely the case with Christopher Kane's Pre-Fall collection, whose reveal today, with its ruffles and reshuffles of his major hits, falls on the brink of the year of his tenth anniversary. “Yes, these frills,” he remarked, looking at a wickedly chic, off-the-shoulder short black dress hanging in his studio in the East End of London. “I did them in my first show in 2006, remember?”
Well, yes, but at that time the frou-frou trimming was synthetic and sourced from a street-market (Kane was only just not a student), and now it resembles something more chiffon-y and dark in a Catherine Deneuve–meets–Marie Antoinette sense, though it's young, too (there are frilled pockets to plunge your hands into, to retrieve an iPhone for nightclub selfie moments). Selfies hadn't even arrived in 2006, remember? And before, there weren't the clear Perspex earrings and the pin-on squiggly patterns which ramp up this delicious look to the peak of desirability, either.
Experts in Kane-ology will likewise spot the tiny gray body-con bandage dress in this collection which is another direct throwback to his first show. They will also be able to parse the rewritten visual sentence which has what looks like strips of plastic gaffer tape criss-crossing the surface of a dress in fluorescent acid yellow, and chopped up randomly over a pair of elbow-length black leather gloves. The neon is a flashback to his "Princess Margaret on acid" collection, and the tape—which also appears in a different guise on jeans—is from his Frankenstein show, a few years back.
The thing about being a tender, very young designer, full of fast and furious creative ideas, is that you rarely have the chance to benefit from them at the time. Things move too quickly to go into a product in depth, and it's all hand-to-mouth survival. Now, with the backing of Kering, Kane has the capacity to build a world out of the cached memories he has stored up—and now, they pop out again, reconfigured in everything from sweatshirts to tailoring to cashmere sweaters to long evening dresses.
They're recognizable, reminiscent, fully realized as a wide commercial collection, but that doesn't make them make them literal reissues. Doing that might be read as cynical or just lazy—two things Christopher Kane would probably rather give up than be described as. He is still young, and rethinking his past collections (which all come, in turn, from his childhood and teenage memories) can still fuse ideas together in thrillingly new ways. This season he did that with a black cutaway dinner jacket overlaid with two fans of transparent pleated fabric—ineffably elegant, sophisticated, sexy, and unforseen. Not the work of an ingenue, but of a grown creative force coming into his own.
