Margaret Howell, you had me at “Suzanne.” The Nina Simone version of the Leonard Cohen standard wafted unobtrusively at the start of Howell’s show on (what felt like on jet lag) a just-as-day-is-breaking Sunday morning in the shadow of London’s National Theatre. That song—and indeed, the show—was a bit like a warm bath; you know exactly what to expect, but you’re more than happy to be experiencing it. The usual line about Howell would normally go something like this: She’s a national treasure dedicated, at least at first glance, to the art of unchanged dressing—crisp shirting, tweedy overcoats, scrubby woolens, and oversize trenches with the perfect ratio of oversize slouch to tailored control. (Airy volume at the back, ever-so-slightly loosely belted at the front, should you be wondering.)
The national treasure bit is right—not just in her sense of eternal and perennial pieces, but in the way Howell has always quietly extolled all sorts of British craft and design, usually of a progressive, humanist bent. Yet that can also make Howell sound like she’s stuck in the same place, telling the same stories, which, on the strength of her Fall 2017 collection for both sexes, is simply not the case. She knows how to calibrate those classics—the standouts this time around: flannel workwear pants, androgynous double-breasted coats, a hybrid of a schoolmarm box pleat skirt and a kilt—with a distinct whiff of today. The shirting that can easily be worn half-tucked or layered one on top of the other. The pants that tapered to the ankle and are secured at the hem with a buttoned tab to further emphasize the silhouette. And a couple of skater-ish flourishes, namely a wooly bobble hat or (shades of the New York shows just finished here) an ultra-long belt tightly buckled, the rest of it left to trail scarf-like down the leg.
She even took what might be one of the most unexpected items of recent times—the apron—and layered it with boyish blazers and pants. Hers seemed to belong in the shared Venn diagram between Vita Sackville-West and the type worn by that cute girl or boy you’ve seen at a Brooklyn (or Brooklyn wannabe) coffee shop, which, in its mix of a glorious past and a relevant now, seems totally and perfectly Margaret Howell.
