This collection from Temperley London drew on an eclectic portfolio of inspirations that spanned the journals of Peter Beard, the structure of spines and fossils, and the abstracted tiger stripes on Tibetan rugs. The best inspiration of all, however, was the vaudevillian adventurer Aloha Wanderwell—so worth a Google—who, during the 1920s, crisscrossed the globe in a Ford Model T by day while entertaining paying audiences by night with stories of her travels.
All this added up to clothes whose gently unconventional femininity came peppered with abstracted Animalia or ethnographic decoration, plus a spritz of safari/explorer sauce. Soft double-knit skirts, high-waist sweaters, and handkerchief-hemmed dresses came edged with an organically inspired geometric pattern in lace or embroidery. Ocher and olive knit sweaters, pants, capes, and skirts were regularly raked with tiger-inspired stripes, while a handsome ruffle-detailed full dress came in a burnt orange fil coupe patterned in an abstracted tiger-inspired camouflage of irregular black and white patches: fierce. Khaki-spectrum cotton voile dresses in apparently haphazard panels of patched check, a sort of deconstructed madras, plus engineered-print caftan-collared midi silk dresses both looked like functionally fabulous daywear equipment. Pantsuits were styled to be worn under patterned caftans, while a loose topstitched cotton drill trench and a khaki backless dress with billowing pockets at the chest and gold beading at the shoulder were both nods to Wanderwell and her intrepid peers. Evening included lots more print (butterflies and clouded leopard) and embroidery (orchids and tiger stripe)—territories that Temperley returns to again and again—as well as some plain colored silk dresses decorated with fern- and spine-inspired arrangements of bead and mirror. Characteristically ornate without being as decoratively literal as late, this Temperley collection was a trip worth taking.
