“I’ve worked hard, and I’ve made a fortune, and I did it in a man’s world, but always, ruthlessly, and with a cruel kind of insistence, I have tried to keep feminine.” Emilia Wickstead read this quote from Fleur Cowles as she gestured toward the mood board she put together for Pre-Fall. The pictures she’d pinned up of the flamboyantly chic editor of Flair in the ’50s (Cowles had cofounded an American advertising agency and sold it, and self-published a magazine of fashion, art, and literary contributions) were interspersed with Cowles’s paintings of roses. Really, you could see how Cowles could resonate as an ideal heroine to this independent designer whose business relies equally on tough day-to-day toil, succinctly updated social dress codes, and, yes, lots of flowers.
Wickstead’s lookbook was shot very recently in New Zealand, “back home” to her, where summer is in full swing. There, among the luscious, burgeoning flower gardens of Auckland, are some of the things that the designer does best—pretty, semi-formal, covered-up flower dresses; crepe tailoring; a corseted top with matching trousers. This time, there was a soupçon of eccentricity with head coverings, either scarves printed to match dresses or spotted net veils that Wickstead attributed to her study of Cowles’s style.
Her choice of location puts her on the same page as Rodarte, with its show of romantic dresses in a New York cemetery, and adjacent to the haunting girls–gardening film Simone Rocha shot with Tyler Mitchell for Moncler. Wickstead is far from being a conceptual designer, but her pictures tune into the odd, slightly saccharine atmospherics surrounding the sweet, modest thematics of the moment. Still, the real narrative moving Wickstead’s business forward is her pitch for protocol-compliant daywear, like her trousers and scarf-neck blouses in subtle, though distinctive, block colors. They’re ideally trimmed to the requirements of women who need to stand out while doing a job on public occasions: young British royals and the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, included.
