The crescendo of the Art School show was a tableau of people hugging, holding hands, and caressing one another’s hair. The central player—who had just stood on the runway, shaking, in a tailored jacket, blonde wig, and stilettos—was picked up, and held aloft by surrounding friends. That physical gesture of support is key to the Art School dynamic—it’s about a movement as much as the clothes. “There’s a sense of community within the show itself,” said Eden Loweth, who, with Tom Barratt, has been instrumental in rewriting the language of fashion in London over the past two years.
It’s hard to compute that it was only in 2017 that Art School placed gender-nonbinary performance presentations in the fashion domain with their first Fashion East show, which was choreographed by Theo Adams Company. They’ve since been part of the collaborative wave of expression of LGBTQI identities in London fashion that was initially formed by the caravan of creative people led by Charles Jeffrey with his Loverboy shows.
This time Art School were out on their own, flown the Fashion East nest for their first stand-alone show. Perhaps that’s why they reached for a posh, grown-up, establishment idea: a night at the Opera, rather than Vogue Fabrics, the Dalston club night that is second home to the young queer culture of London. Quite a good trope to cover the fact that Art School’s chief thing has turned out to be eveningwear, whether glittery dresses or tailoring.
The term glad rags could have been coined for it. There were developments of their asymmetrical bias-cut dagger dresses, new skirts in giant gold paillettes, a gold-foiled belted safari suit, and big-skirted cotton gowns. The ragged bit? Fragmentary velvet dresses with jagged holes, and cutaway T-shirts. On heads: What might have read as off-kilter top hats were actually constructed by Shiori Takahashi from old boots and other trash can detritus. In fact, as a program note told us, they were “found objects . . . created from disregarded, repurposed lost property from queer spaces across London.” Each work comes with a label indicating the area from which it was inspired.
So, that’s progress, then. There is at least one more welcoming place, now: catwalk fashion, an arena in which Art School has brought the terms gender nonbinary and trans into mainstream discussion. Remarkable that this has happened in the space of only 24 months. Fashion always looks forward, but that’s a cultural milestone which has been passed, and which matters.
