When there’s a group of guys dancing at 9:30 in the morning on a Sunday in the east end of London, and people are standing about nodding their heads at them, you’d usually be correct in assuming they’d all been there since the night before. But no: This was Bianca Saunders, rising to the challenge of an ungodly early slot for her presentation, and then clearly smashing it on the audience-approval meter. The guys were actually separated from one another in a line of satin-draped booths, with the audience milling around, united in one contagious outbreak of smiles.
It’s too bad that you can’t see their moves in these stills, but Saunders’s Instagram captures the boys—unselfconscious dancers, all—activating the merits of her cleanly-designed redefinitions of tailoring and streetwear in their booths.
“I was watching this early ’90s video shot in a Jamaican dance hall in Kingston,” Saunders said, standing beside a wall projection on the way in. “I’m a Londoner and Jamaica is my background. And for a long time, I threw house parties, growing up.” The idea for her presentation setup, simple but effective, was “that people would dance, like they would normally do in a club, in the dark, when no one’s watching.” Casting the show in her studio, she said, “We put on music and asked them to dance. I street-cast some of them and others are agency models. It was really fun. I should’ve recorded it,” she laughed. “It was like a dance competition.”
Intellectually, what interests Saunders is how clothes move; that and really understanding what guys her age think about how they relate to them. In the booths, they put her “new three-piece suits” and elevated takes on tracksuits to the test. Saunders looks like what she designs—she has a youthful modern elegance which comes from her generation’s veneration of the cool, clean ’90s (Helmut Lang and all that, though she was barely born). That’s what motivates her slick and functional cutting, and how she came up with the matched reconfigurations of three-piece suits—long vests extending beneath regular jackets, with sheer or body-hugging T-shirts. What you can’t see—it’s a pity—is the swagger these have in movement, whether walking or dancing. Her other idea for a three-piece: a matching dark denim combination of long vest, shirt, and trousers.
It takes a lot for young men to fake liking clothes; you can always tell when they think something makes them look like an idiot. But this lot were plainly feeling Saunders’s constructs—the minimal, membrane-y raincoats, the gray tracksuit set apart from sports shop generic with a ruched shoulder. “I always look at what happens to clothes on the body when guys move, what makes things relatable to them. Like, I put an adjuster in the back of the pants so they can make them fit the way they want.”
For her Masters studies in fashion at the Royal College of Art, Saunders documented boys she knows, talking to them in their bedrooms about their wardrobes. (It’s surprising how little that young men, culture regardless, are ever asked to verbalize their feelings and opinions.)
“I did a project with Brioni when I was at the RCA, and that was a big turning point for me. That’s when I decided to stop studying women’s and commit to menswear,” Saunders explains. She graduated three years ago, and two fellow alumni collaborated with her: Saul Nash, the designer-choreographer, directed the boys, and sustainable accessory designer Hernán Guardamagna made her the dance-ready square-toed moccasins with draped, recycled uppers. All of this cohort have started out knowing that they can’t justify making more clothes and accessories unless they take care to minimize environmental damage.
Saunders’s credits showed that her denim was sponsored by Isko, a major certified producer of organic and recycled material, based in Turkey. Smart that they are on the lookout for attuned young designers like Bianca Saunders to support; she has something distinctive: vision, empathy, and practical application. With those ingredients, she could go far.
