Vivienne Westwood, illustrated by Kerry Lemon
While things like free booze and miniature pies are thoroughly good perks of a fashion week, it is also completely inevitable that you somehow manage to end up with hundreds of bits of paper and about six half-drunk bottles of water rolling around in your bag, and sure enough by the time I reached the Ravensbourne show I had unwittingly acquired three in the space of forty five minutes. Out of all the shows at Graduate Fashion Week, Ravensbourne is the hottest ticket – so hot, in fact, that only Vivienne bloody Westwood was in the audience. We found out afterwards that she’s working on a climate change television project with the college’s media course and went to support the fashion students. Her presence proved a bit of a personal distraction during the show and I seemed less concerned about what I was thinking than what she was thinking. It was a bit difficult to tell though.
Judging by the pleasantly psychotic combinations of ideas on show one can only presume that the class of Ravensbourne BA 2010 took a trip to the zoo on a cocktail of hallucinogens and then sat down to design their collections. With the extensive parade of animals on show it was like the four-footed refugees of Noah’s Ark had washed up on the beaches of Graduate Fashion Week – after a more muted and minimalist BA show from Central St Martins, it was a eye-popping joy to watch, with cartoons and pop art emerging as other pungent themes. The show was opened by Bobby Charles Abley with a menswear collection that proved children’s cartoons and bondage need not be two mutually alienating concepts, even if they are more than a little disturbing when thrown together. Speech bubble printed trousers, stuffed teddy bears and hoods with animal ears were paired with bondage straps in innocuous looking primary colours.
While Ravensbourne is particularly well known for producing amazing digital prints, Sera Ulger’s womenswear collection featured beautifully hand painted animal motifs on silk, featuring a crow, a lemur, a tarsier and an owl with its eyes in suggestive places on a selection of mohair dresses.
Ravensbourne took the Menswear Award for the second year in a row with Thomas Crisp’s elegantly tailored collection of leather and velvet jackets, based on Parisian street gangs in the late 1800s.
Amy Addison’s designs featured digital prints, miniskirts, thigh high socks and sleeves ending in boxing gloves…
…while Jessica Holmes’s cocktail dresses were emblazoned with ducks and Dumbos.
We’ve also come to expect a lot of accomplished knitwear. Harriet Clinch’s retro knitwear was basically a walking seventies ski lodge – simple jumpers and a star-spangled poncho with a vast selection of different knits thrown into the mix – stripes, bobbles, fair isle and cables, accessorised with sheepskin oven mitts and even a knitted camera.
photographs courtesy of catwalking.com
Tags:
1800s, Amy Addison, Bobby Charles Abley, cartoons, Central Saint Martins, Climate Change, Digital Prints, ducks, Earls Court, fashion, Graduate Fashion Week 2010, Harriet Clinch, knitwear, london, menswear, Pop Art, ravensbourne, Sera Ulger, Ski, Teddy Bears, Thomas Crisp, Velvet, Womenswear
