There are Scottish threads running through all of Christopher Kane’s work if you look hard enough, but this time his collection was wholly woven from them. Finally, Kane found himself able to look clearly at the turn of the century Glaswegian architecture, furniture, and textiles of the genius Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, and the results were prolifically pretty and inventive. First, though, there was a hurdle to cross. The Mackintosh heritage industry is so much part of Scottish culture that “it was always rammed down our throats in school,” Kane said. But pushing aside the mental block built up by the tourist merchandising, he and his sister Tammy found another level to engage with the Macintoshes. “They were outsiders in their day. He was celebrated in Paris, everywhere, but not here.” The Kanes identify with outsider-y feelings, and love the satisfaction of co-opting things which are deemed common. And so, the Mackintosh trip began.
Kane gained permission to shoot the collection at Hill House, Mackintosh’s domestic masterpiece in Helensburgh. All the echoes are there, merged with Kane’s own family album of work over the past 11 years. A key was a photograph of the Mackintoshes, with Margaret and her friends in Edwardian flounced blouses and puffed sleeves, which sent Kane back to the suspended frills he designed in an early collection, and to reiterate his biker jacket in white lace, with a deep frilled collar. A beautiful long white lace dress was embroidered with snake’s head fritillaries, straight from Margaret Macdonald’s stylized drawings. A black grid-pattern tunic, covered in bugle beads and decorated with roses, was a direct homage to the design of the chairs in the famous Willow Tearooms in Glasgow. “And look,” Kane laughed, “there’s a tablecloth skirt with it!” A white cotton piecrust collared blouse and matching frill-trimmed skirt was, in his mind, “the waitress.”
Going fully Scottish led to plenty of Kane side narratives, a whole storybook of ideas for everything from the basic everyday thing, like a Royal Stewart tartan mini-kilt, to the elaborate white patchworked dress for “a ceilidh!” There was a tangent which went punkish, involving “Angel-wing” angora knits, marabou feathers and silver chains worn as chokers, earrings and—quite brilliantly—adapted as the chain-link handle on a tartan bag. Finally, there was the autobiographical quirky bit—the “Cleaner” subplot, with domestic sponges attached to patent shoes (a continuation from Fall, but now also bedazzled with crystal jewels on the toes), and the gingham taffeta smock and pants Kane attributes to seeing his mother’s cleaning overalls as a child. She wore those “when she went out slaving in schools to keep us all going. I suppose that’s why I’ve always liked gingham.”
Still, none of this was obvious as an open scrapbook of literal inspirations from all those layers of Glaswegian history, personal and national—well, except for the Scotland sweater, and the one with the red Scottish lion rampant, from the royal banner. Kane is a designer rather than a cut-and-paste image appropriator. What’s important to him is that his sources are “genuine and authentic to us,” he said. “And people really respond to that.”
