Christopher Kane hotfooted it back to base camp in London after showing Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke a good time at the Met Gala—you surely clocked the pair in his “Rubberist” and “Looner” fetish shifts—to present his Pre-Fall collection. Here you see it, photographed in and around the utilitarian stairwells and loading bays of the Edwardian ex-industrial building in Shacklewell Lane where Kane, his sister Tammy, and their team have worked for nearly a decade. Instead of taking his audience off on a fantasy resort trip, this one is basically a stay-at-home experience. Albeit one with a lot of surreptitiously naughty fantasy emanating from behind those closed doors.
Sexual symbolism and playful perviness have been visibly playing through Kane’s shows since he invoked the suburban Madam Cynthia Payne in Spring 2017. With this one, he’s teased out his obsession with Marilyn Monroe, whose voice he used in a recent catwalk show, saying, “Sex is part of nature. I go along with nature.” That’s how he arrived at the Monroe with a kitten print on a pink duchesse satin top—“because she was known as an animal lover”—and then a flurry of coded references to ’50s cliches, from hand-drawn polka dots and boudoir negligees to ladylike pearls.
The cleverness in Kane’s collections is how many shades, from chic to simple, they manage to contain without losing continuity or identity. There’s a quite amazing amalgam of a dress that flows down through black lace and a gold chainmail bodice into a gathered satin polka dot skirt. The pearls colonize a white shirt, dripping from the collar and cascading down the front; loops of them trickle onto tailored pantsuits (substituting for the highly successful crystal trimmings he’s been running recently); and fringes swish on toeless pink pumps. It’s that odd glamour, running the gamut from wearable utilitarian everyday pieces to the extreme—a “grunge” green latex puff-sleeve dress—that keeps things “special,” as Kane likes to term it.
He is not one of those who insists on stoking up desire while insisting on deferred gratification, though. The first pieces from Pre-Fall are dropping on his online store today.
