This afternoon, a throng of patrons and editors might be noticed crowding into Emilia Wickstead’s flagship retailer on Sloane Road—not for a spot of mid–Trend Week buying, it turned out, however to soak up the designer’s new assortment. Wickstead and her crew had reworked the area right into a salon-style setup with rows of stylish wooden chairs lining every interconnecting room. To these aware of the early days of Wickstead’s profession, when she acquired a following by internet hosting trunk exhibits at her first retailer on Pont Road, it felt like a full-circle second. “I truly designed the Sloane Road retailer to be a present area,” she mentioned at a preview. “I feel it feels proper for the place we’re as a model. It feels very nice to ask everybody into the home that we’ve constructed.”
Wickstead additionally mentioned she designed the area—all glass and marble and sharp angles—to recall a up to date artwork gallery, which made it an applicable backdrop for a group that took its cues from the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Given the provocative, eye-popping materials present in a few of Mapplethorpe’s extra memorable work, it could sound like an sudden pairing for a designer whose elegant attire are beloved by the royals and Oscar-winning main women. However Wickstead was fast to level out that the parallels run deeper than you may assume. “Clearly he’s identified for his radical sensuality and his explorations of identification, however equally for his lovely portraits of ladies, and portraits of the shapes of the physique, and utilizing flowers as a metaphor for the physique,” she mentioned. “I discover his work to be very emotional and romantic and poetic and generally unhappy. And punchy, after all.”
Wickstead cleverly translated this sentiment into garments that would simply slot into her buyer’s wardrobe: First out was a sequence of plaid attire that had been sliced and layered and twisted across the waist to create jarring clashes of diagonals, which eased right into a sequence of extra structured attire with relaxed and sometimes pleated skirts that carried a satisfying swish as fashions walked at a ferocious tempo throughout the checkered flooring. That “punch” issue got here by in a hanging drop-waist robe slathered with vivid yellow sequins and a royal blue bubble gown, in addition to a handful of tomboyish appears to be like—shirts and polo knits with denims, miniskirts with gridlike crisscrossing strips of material—that showcased Wickstead’s sharp eye for (and rising enterprise round) extra informal separates.
There have been direct references to the moody palettes Mapplethorpe favored in a few of his lesser-known coloration pictures of flowers—icy blue, powder pink, buttercup yellow—in addition to black lace-up leather-based footwear and ties adorned with a print of vibrant orchids floating in a black ether. (A nod to Mapplethorpe’s kinkier facet was rendered in a really Wickstead means, by strips of material that had been tied round clothes or whizzed up into bows, changing the leather-based straps and belts the artist was so keen on with delicate silks.) The haunting soundtrack, in the meantime, sampled the “Vissi D’arte” aria from Tosca, which Patti Smith wrote about listening to on repeat following Mapplethorpe’s dying. Wickstead cited Smith, too, as somebody she was enthusiastic about whereas designing the gathering; particularly the benefit and effortlessness of her model, which Wickstead translated into items reduce from chiffon and exquisitely crinkled satin, in addition to a basic emphasis on unfastened, breezy silhouettes.
It says loads about Wickstead as a designer that, whereas she might simply relaxation on her laurels, persevering with to pump out fairly attire and tailoring for her loyal clientele of largely skilled and artistic ladies, she nonetheless likes to problem herself. The explanation her clientele is so loyal, in any case, is as a result of she instinctively understands them. (As a result of, properly, Wickstead is a inventive skilled herself.) And similar to the designer, who continues to push into new territory and discover fascinating methods to fold her wide-ranging cultural pursuits into her collections, she understands they wish to be challenged as properly. “I feel that each one of Mapplethorpe’s portraits had been all the time very commanding, and I do assume that the Emilia Wickstead girl is sort of commanding,” the designer mentioned. “I didn’t need the gathering to really feel tame, however I wished to search out the proper stability. The inspiration was very sturdy, however I additionally wished to make it my very own.” That she did. And to paraphrase one other determine in Mapplethorpe’s orbit, it was a delight to see Wickstead stroll on the wild facet.
