They don’t wear this up in Langport. I’ve recently been visiting Alice Temperley’s bucolic corner of Somerset to hang out with my sister and brother-in-law, who have set up an antiques and vintage furniture business in the area. We sometimes mention Alice because the Temperleys are proper old local—and grand fromages as such. All this is apropos of the fact that Temperley’s new collection is, as she put it, “for the country girl,” and features “leather shirts, leather all-in-ones, denim, and shirting, [all] how I want to mix it…” As she waxed lyrically forth, I thought back to my most recent Somerset social gathering, an impromptu meeting outside Pendra’s Fish & Chips. There were battered burgers on the menu, but not a lot in the way of leather shirting.
Temperley, though, is not an anthropological designer and her clothes are not reportage. Instead she draws from the woo woo mythology of her home turf—Glastonbury and all that—then filters it through a highly refined prism of rural bohemianism and romanticism to muster a fantasy of ethereal English countryside prettiness. It’s a long-honed process in which she is now supremely proficient, and here Temperley delivered a diverse salvo of desirable wearables.
Among the highlights you’ll probably never see on her local high street but would translate wonderfully to many other milieus were moiré print overalls paired with lacy tops, slick lamé knits, a marinière sweater whose stripes were set against the words “dreaming and doing,” finely constructed lace day dresses, fireworks-patterned sequin evening dresses, a cool, similarly studded firework biker, and a spaghetti-strapped evening dress with stars at the neckline.
