Totally foiled

Fashion East: Luke Stevens SS17
By Elizabeth Coop | Fashion | 12 June 2016

Turning out talent including the likes of Jonathan Anderson, Astrid Andersen and Craig Green, Fashion East’s list of alumni just goes to show how successful it is as an platform for emerging designers. This season’s triptych welcomed Luke Stevens and duo James Theseus Buck and Luke Brooks as ‘Rottingdean Bazaar’, while Rory Parnell-Mooney returned for another season with a standalone space. 

Fresh from graduating at the Royal College of Art just last year, Luke Stevens exhibited his MA collection as part of Fashion East’s MAN presentation today. “It’s an examination of the habitual, the everyday, the banal and the ubiquitous,” Stevens told us in our RCA collections preview last week. And, it was.

This concept was emphasised once again today, this time finding reiteration through the rhetorical questions of Georges Perec: “What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?” These are the words that Stevens borrowed to encapsulate his collection, aptly sitting at the bottom of an otherwise blank press release.

Repurposing items like a scaffolding net, tin foil and foam – that he told us were taken “from the chair in my studio” – the designer gave new life to the mundane.

A caped shirt hung from the ceiling over a chair laid flat on the floor in disuse. The shirt was made from net and tin, showing Stevens’ experimentation with the duality of the made and unmade, finding beauty in the found and rediscovering the forgotten.

GALLERYCatwalk images from Fashion East: Luke Stevens SS17


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