It was an interesting morning at the V&A today when Molly Goddard, and her mother, father, sister, and boyfriend, moved in and converted the vast new subterranean Sainsbury Centre into a delightful, on-a-shoestring Molly-world. “I was brought up coming here with my mum on Saturdays,” said Goddard as she sprawled out on a huge, red velvet–draped bed on one side of the cavernous hall. “I realize when I start talking that I know such a lot about the things in the museum. Like this bed’s based on the 1700 State Bed from Melville House in Scotland. Mum painted an old dust sheet for the cover—she had to take it into her local park to do it, because her front room’s about as big as this bed. She tacked the back drapes on a board, and she made those rosettes with tissue paper,” she said, pointing 11 feet up to the canopy. “And you see that stack of Wedgwood china there? They’re actually plastic washing-up bowls she painted!”
The family homage to the 165-year-old British temple of arts and crafts was the setting for Goddard’s “Fashion in Motion” show, an invitation bestowed by the museum upon designers to show their work charge-free to a public audience in three sittings. This time, though, the honor was a doubly big deal: Goddard was chosen as the first guest to show in the new wing, designed and built by Amanda Levete’s AL_A architectural practice, a space excavated from deep beneath the Victorian museum, and grandly opened to national fanfare a couple of weeks ago. A bit of a pressure on a young designer, then? “Yes. We wondered how we’d fill it, and I knew it would be ridiculously pretentious to call it a ‘retrospective’ because I’ve only been going five years!” So, there was a surprise for Molly-watchers: some things not seen before, in the shape of soft tartan flannel and flower-sprigged cotton prints. “I don’t want to call it Resort or Pre-,” said Goddard, reluctantly quoting the standard terminology. “But we did show it to buyers, and it’s sold really well! And the V&A has been so on my mind that I suppose the tartan came about by thinking about the costume department: the punk things, which will be in the case next to 18th-century gowns.” The flower-printed cotton, flounced dresses and midis, and one hooped skirt reminiscent of a Westwood mini-crini of the ’80s stood out as refreshing breakthroughs.
The family enterprise rolled into high gear in preparation for the daunting scale of the event months ago. Sarah Edwards—Goddard’s set-designing mother, who has put together all the props, from Goddards first life-drawing presentation to the sandwich-making factory, up to last season’s dinner party—was charged to remake some favorite V&A things, but with stuff from a dollar store. Goddard’s stylist sister Alice re-rounded up all of Goddard’s favorite models and went on a further London street-casting mission to corral a troupe of 35 girls, a mixed-race spectrum of normally lovely people with unselfconsciously okay-with-themselves attitudes whom Goddard has always pointed out as her kind of beauty. Tom Shickle, her boyfriend and partner, liaised with production, and her dad assisted his wife, stepping up to last-minute flower-arranging additions to the blue and white Delft section, where a striped tarpaulin formed a tablecloth, the “tiled” wall was sticky-backed plastic bought on a roll, the tulip bowls were stacks of plastic buckets, and the antique place settings were hand-painted paper plates.
Goddard remixed her archive pieces: all the sweeping smocked and ruched taffeta and tulle frocks that tomgirls have fallen in love with; a rainbow-striped sweater and crochet dress; and a retrieved patchwork of plasticized paper doilies she made for her BA graduation collection from Central Saint Martins. The girls wound around a central set, an impression of statues in the V&A plaster court. Some stopped to sit on stools and sketch, others piled onto the great bed, the rest congregated to chat around the Delft table. The young girls who had stood in line to get in gazed on rapturously at a performance, which, in true Goddard form, embraced and enhanced the feeling of non-saccharine, indie English romanticism. Rarely are the nice, relaxed happy things that can happen in adolescence held up as the subject of fashion. That’s the first-person feeling that Molly Goddard sketches out season by season. It was on a much bigger canvas, in a much grander, modern space this time, but somehow the resourceful Goddards still almost made it feel like home.
