BEAUTY: Clothing--Richard Quinn

This September iteration of London Fashion Week was upended by the death of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and many designers cancelled shows or have rescheduled them for a later date. But some designers chose to move ahead, albeit in a respectful way.

Regular readers know that twice a year--winter and summer--I blog about the marvelous creations designers send down the runway in England, Italy, and France, but for the men's shows only. However, for this posting I want to share with you a very arresting SS '23 womenswear collection at London Fashion Week from Richard Quinn. His intended theme was going to do with surveillance in our modern world and was going to be expressed in his usual riotously colorful creations. But the death of The Queen touched Quinn so deeply that he and his core team of six, plus 20 show-time helpers, worked day and night, in the 10 days after Her Majesty's death to create 22 looks all in black mourning.

Quinn said, "It was a real labor of love, I suppose...It was almost cathartic for us to put all of our emotions of mourning into it. We wanted it to have that kind of real craftsmanship, the beauty of royalty, and to try to turn all of the shapes and embroidery that we do into that kind of that idea of uniform dressing up they did when her father [King George VI] died."

Two ideas strike me about this opulent collection. The first has to do with the sheer amount of variety that Quinn managed to pack into a look that cannot rely on color. His silhouettes are a dizzying lesson in fashion history with cuts and shapes from the Georgian/Regency period of the mid 1700s to the early 1800s, all the way to the 1950s (with references to garments that look as if they could have been by the newly crowned Elizabeth II) and even the mod 60s. But all, masterfully, in black...with complicated layers of beading, brocade, and feathers.

Secondly, I can't help but flash on the idea of public mourning and how Queen Victoria, dressed in black with a veil after losing her beloved Prince Albert, ushered in a style of dressing that lasted for decades with the public in modest black mourning clothing on a seemingly permanent basis. While I don't think the British at large are going to be wearing black for the next thirty years, it is nonetheless a poignant and jarring moment to see so many people reacting to such a momentous, historic shift in culture and society.

https://www.richardquinn.com/