2014 Spring London Fashion Week Christopher Kane

STYLE.COM

Our featured Designer is Christopher Kane.

Christopher Kane

Spring 2014 Ready-to-Wear

by Sarah Mower

It’s highly amusing to watch people hiding their bafflement when they congregate backstage to ask Christopher Kane questions about where his collection came from. This time, he replied beaming: “Sex Ed. Biology textbooks. And Jean-Léon Gérôme’s paintings of girls being sold in a marketplace in Roman times, with all this drapery, and hands plucking their clothes off.” Hmm. What does this information add to our appreciation of his collection? Hardly anything, except it explains the reason he put in a segment of lace and organza appliqués resembling diagrams of plants and flowers with arrows describing photosynthesis and botanical reproduction. True, there’s something in every Christopher Kane collection that was seeded at Taylor High, the school where he and his sister Tammy were the teenage stars of the art class. But the relevance of starting-point references shrinks to insignificance compared with the way the clothes turn out after the siblings have spent months jamming together, trying out new techniques (fuzzy, magically metallic bonded fibers in pink, blue, and silver), finessing familiar ones (like plissé chiffon, delicately shaded mint-to-white, to flutter from the sides of dresses), and generally thinking: What looks amazingly new now? What will astonish everyone this time?

In the end, Kane will hardly be able to retrieve why he started to make his first-ever midi- and ankle-grazing dresses this summer. All that mattered was his conviction that it’s right—and that he explore that subject in many variations this season, including structured A-line dresses with abstract, petal-shaped portholes, edged in iridescent plastic; fluted satin dresses with asymetric wrapped tops; and stiff, semi-sheer organza and swishy, pleated, print skirts. And the looks kept on coming, ending with a drop-dead chic black halter dress with jewels in the neckline.

These past two seasons, since he got the backing of the powerful Kering group, Kane’s almost been showing several mini-collections in one. This show contained something for everyone who’s already addicted to Kane’s trophy pieces, but also something for many other women, those more grown-up or tomboyish, who might be persuaded that there’s plenty to find in his tailoring—like the two black pantsuits he showed as well as all the sweatshirts. It made for a lot to process in a singular go, and maybe there were some over-contrived moments. But all in all, the range Kane has is immensely impressive, right down to his sparkling flower jewelry, which was strung on stretchy bands that can be wrapped and clipped onto clothing at will. The best news: This vast ability to provide depth of product augurs well for the opening of the first Christopher Kane store, slated to happen in London next year.

Christopher Kane

Pre-Fall 2014 Ready-to-Wear

By Tim Blanks

Christopher Kane is not too proud to name his shame. He's an ophidiophobe—he's terrified of snakes. But, just like the song lyric goes, fear is a man's best friend. From the very beginning of Kane's career, snakes have slithered through his collections to great effect. He claims it's got something to do with his Catholic upbringing: Adam and Eve, original sin, sneaky serpents in Eden. Fact is, everyone should be so lucky as to have such a creative outlet for their manias and phobias, especially when snakes have so much to offer in terms of texture, pattern, color, sinuous silhouette…

All four distinguished Kane's Pre-Fall collection as one more sterling addition to a repertoire that continues to hypnotize as effectively as, well, as a hooded cobra. Except that this time, it was the boa constrictor that Kane had his eye on. It made its presence felt in huge, elasticized, snake-printed bands as wide as a wrestler's belt. Kane used one to put the squeeze on a dress that was little more than a huge square of satin. The result—a bit like belting a Hefty Sak—didn't work as well as the tightly wrapped biker jacket, though it did highlight the risks Kane likes to take with his silhouettes. They tend to pay off. Those tricky falling-apart dresses he first showed last fall? They were huge sellers. This season, he added zips, for a little more structure.

Where Kane makes his riskiest moves is often in the shadow land between propriety and vulgarity. A lesser talent might trip over a detail like the frill of snake-printed chiffon that spilled from seams, or the denim pieces, also snake-printed and trimmed in black leather ("It makes the snake even more evil," Kane exulted.) Or the goat-fur jackets, luminously tipped in a near-toxic serpentine green or blue. (The designer thrilled to the prospect of them paired with high heels in fuchsia snake.) What marries good and bad taste in a Kane collection is his unique, unholy, alchemical ability to transform the monstrous into the glamorous. He'd call it "weird science." It was responsible for his latest visual motif: a molecular structure that cropped up on football-jersey tops, as fastenings on a snaky jacquard shift, and as jewelry with a double-helix flavor. This time next year, you can expect to see the Kane molecule going viral.

Christopher Kane

Pre-Fall 2014 Ready-to-Wear

Christopher Kane

Fall 2014 Ready-to-Wear

By Tim Blanks

"She's a girl named Kate who thinks she's really great, but she's not." The wonderful song that soundtracked Christopher Kane's show today was by Chandra Oppenheim, whose single, edgy 1980 release has become a lost nugget of post-punk gold. Chandra was 12 at the time, which surely qualifies her as a child prodigy. That's a category in which Kane can match her, on one level at least (although he'll be a great big kid forever). His huge new collection was yet one more geyser of creativity, a spill of ideas that prodded fashion forward in unanticipated new ways. And if the spill was toxic at times, that was simply a measure of his limitless imagination. For every light, there's a shadow. And vice versa.

There was a lot of that in this collection. The vice was humble black nylon; the versa, lustrous mink. Together—fur lining a nylon coat, for instance—they made the most provocative statement about the fetishistic heart of fashion that we've seen in many a dark moon. Kane toys with desire in ways that unsettle. You'll hear women talking about how impossible it is to resist his clothes. His recent collaboration for Love magazine with Japanese eroticist Nobuyoshi Araki possibly infected this collection. The nylon was initially used as an almost military accent—there was even a quilted nylon "life preserver"—but it transmogrified into something more perverse: a ruffle on a skirt, a harness-like bodice, a lace-trimmed petticoat. A chunk of black PVC in the middle of it all was like a huge exclamation mark, adding heft to the elevation of nylon.

But the thing about Kane is that his collections are never just about this. There is also that…and that…and that. As one story was poking you, another was insinuating itself, the nylon hybridizing with guipure lace and fur; a linear scattering of crystals running like LED lights up and down a gorgeous double-breasted coat in ice pink; knits that were oddly evocative of an uptight Victorian blouse, except that they were in the sickest shades of yellow or Pepto-Bismol pink. One of Kane's signatures is mad science. The reproductive botanicals of his Spring collection were echoed in the lenticular imagery that he slotted into tops and skirts. This effect alone was so peculiar that you couldn't even imagine it occurring to any other designer. It was promptly followed by pieces whose "sleeves" looked like sinuous Plasticine forms into which the models' arms were inserted. The creation of new forms is a challenge for designers in any discipline. Kane leaves us with indelible new images from every collection.

This time, he saved the best for last. Kane said he'd been looking for a different way to treat organza. His solution? Dresses composed of fifty dark-trimmed leaves of the fabric, ruffling like the pages of a book in a dulcet breeze. Sculptural, ethereal…there may have been a hint of the unsung Roman couturier Roberto Capucci. But the vortices created by the dresses in movement were pure, mad-scientific Christopher Kane.