Excuse me for this, but I am going to go out on a limb and talk about the show after Margaret Howell’s before we even get to what she showed on the runway. (Bear with me, there’s a method to this madness.) Victoria Beckham was up after Margaret Howell, and outside her show was a quiet and respectful demonstration from the London chapter of Extinction Rebellion. Pre–London shows, there was plenty of chatter about the eco-activist group shutting down the city’s Fashion Week. So far that hasn’t happened, but truth be told does it even need to? Anyone attending the run of Spring 2020 shows can’t not be thinking about the environmental impact of fashion and what it means to be seeing new clothes at a time when we’re consuming and discarding at an ever faster clip. There’s a growing sense that whatever we buy from now on—and a moment of unflinching, cold-light-of-day reality here: continue to buy we will—had better come with some value, some staying power, some sense of it making a meaningful contribution to our wardrobes.
This brings us to—you knew we’d get there eventually—Margaret Howell, a designer whose long-standing raison d’être has been to go slow and steady while others around her were losing their heads going fast and frenetic. Her collection for next season, regardless of whether it’s for women or for men (she showed both on her runway, at the Rambert dance school in the shadow of the National Theatre), demonstrated yet again her enviably strong and definitive handwriting—utilitarian, tailored, unfussy—which, by its thoughtful and considerate inclusivity, allows for all sorts of individual entry points into her look. Hers is a vocabulary of clothes—the trench, the shirt, the blazer—she reexamines and reinvents by fractional degrees, the easier to keep and make your own.
For Spring 2020 that means plenty of suiting, with higher buttoning; looser-cut jackets worn with tapering trousers tucked into slouchy socks and flat leather sandals; and other times substantially collared shirts atop fluid Bermuda shorts, again with the omnipresent socks-and-sandals combo. Often they came out in mirror-image gender pairings, effectively the same outfit on a guy, then a girl, or vice versa. Howell has long presented the case for the notion of gender irrelevance, prioritizing a sense of naturalness and comfort over the artifice and affect of fashion; so the olive cotton parka on a guy was cut with the same swinging ease as a drop-waisted dress worn by a woman.
There was also a terrific ’50s abstract linear print that evoked the work of textile designer Lucienne Day, whose graphic patterns appeared at another time when Britain was undergoing a moment of profound change and self-examination. Who’s to say if there wasn’t a sly nod to the current landscape of the United Kingdom as it renegotiates where it is in the world, but the one certainty is that Howell’s clothes exuded a sense of relevance and realness to our lives today. Any one of the looks in this show could have walked straight off the runway onto the street—and last for years to come. Right now that feels like the very best way to be and no higher compliment to pay.
