There’s just no stopping Julien Macdonald. No matter what this review says, Macdonald is going to keep on making body-con women’s clothes that look as though they emerged from the feverish imagination of a teenage boy who just saw the Princess Leia slave scene in Star Wars for the first time. And why shouldn’t he? After all, Macdonald has established a nice business for himself turning out those kinds of looks and won a bevy of boldface name fans, several of whom could be spotted sipping bright blue cocktails in the front row of his show at Goldsmiths’ Hall this afternoon. If it sells, if it gets photographed, then the Julien Macdonald concept of modern womanhood has claimed the right to exist, surely.
But . . . here’s the thing. As a society, we’ve backed ourselves into a critical cul-de-sac where you can’t register any objection to the Julien Macdonald aesthetic—offered up today in its most sparkly, most skin-baring, most unapologetic mode—without coming off like a prude, or a fussbudget who thinks fashion should be dryly tasteful. But please allow your humble correspondent to register this complaint: This collection was boring. Repetitive, unprovocative in its sexiness, so awash in flash that the effect, as a whole, was blinding. The tedium made it difficult to appreciate the good in Macdonald’s clothes. His crochets were really a marvel, so strong yet so fine-spun. His cutaway jumpsuits and suspended dresses were feats of engineering. All the garments were executed with exceptional polish. You could witness all that design intelligence in Macdonald’s clothes and still come away wishing he’d found something more interesting to say than sex sells. (Or, for the men’s looks: studs, for studs.) There was a party-like atmosphere at Macdonald’s show. But the takeaway was a bummer.
