Charlie Constantinou is not the first designer to describe this season as something of a clean slate; an opportunity to reground, or even reorient their practices. For him, this entailed a “narrative shift away from a lens of character building,” he said in a preview. In its place was a renewed focus on the fundamentals of garment making.
The object of his contemplation this season was the vernacular of uniform, though perhaps not the kinds you’d expect of a designer acclaimed for his hand-wrought approach to gorp-inflected style. “We were looking at a lot of military uniforms from the 18th and 19th centuries,” he said, reconsidering the dress codes of the likes of Lord Nelson and Napoleon “through a modern lens.”
From the outset there was a sense of militaristic sternness and formal rigor. A stone gray mackintosh and a padded chore jacket, both with an asymmetrical fastening redolent of a historical lieutenant’s jacket, came with jutting epaulettes and shoulder tabs. A hooded, zip-up sweater with a nipped-in storm flap had punchy purple appliqués, echoing the ornate gilt frogging you might find on an admiral’s uniform.
“I’m really fascinated by these romanticized, almost costume-y silhouettes and details,” said Constantinou. “Though of course they’re deeply impractical in terms of function, so it was about transforming that into something that’s actually more wearable.” As is to be expected from Constantinou, a diligent sense of handcraft made itself felt across the collection. Traditionally decorative pleating and braiding details were translated here as toggles that enabled a degree of modularity, allowing for a loosening of seemingly strict forms.
While uniform—and by extension uniformity—was the season’s key theme, its implicit associations with faceless homogeneity were counterposed by the designer’s signature approach to color. “It was kind of a direct contradiction,” he said, noting the collection’s textural cold-dyed palette spanning British Redcoat scarlet, camo fatigue khaki and dip-dyed blacks-to-ice-blues. “Even when we go on to produce this collection, no garment would ever be the same,” he said. “It’s about evoking the sense of togetherness that uniform provides, while also contradicting it.”
