If there was an award for essentially the most atmospheric and thematically apt venue at London Vogue Week this season, the Knwls house will surely be up there. At their present tonight, designers Charlotte Knowles and Alexandre Arsenault got the run of the previous Central Saint Martins constructing in Holborn, which has laid dormant since 2011, the previous lecture rooms accumulating mud. As a soundtrack of krautrock and Swedish grunge started blasting from the audio system, flakes of crumbling plaster had been shaken from the ceiling as if a sleeping big was reawakening. And whereas it was the Charing Cross campus down the street that technically performed host to the college’s legendary trend program (of which Knowles and Arsenault are additionally graduates, though they studied there after the faculty moved to its shiny new campus in King’s Cross), there was nonetheless a way of the specters of trend historical past returning to hang-out its corridors as soon as once more.
This was not least on account of Knowles’s and Arsenault’s willingness to pay homage to a few of their heroes, lots of whom as soon as studied within the now-cobwebbed rooms they confirmed in—at a preview appointment, they reeled off a listing from Azzedine Alaïa to John Galliano. “We had been what trend was, and what it grew to become once we began, and the place it is now going—and the place we need to go together with it,” mentioned Arsenault. Added Knowles, “It seems like a really elegant house. And this season feels fairly elegant to me.”
Elegant it was, nevertheless it nonetheless retained that signature high-octane Knwls power and grit. Fashions strutted and vamped and twirled in an preliminary sequence of appears to be like that showcased the duo’s outstanding corsetry abilities—warping handled leathers into artfully cinched and strapped waists, or taking grey terry tracksuits and remodeling them into cropped hoodies and swishy, high-waisted pants—in addition to their deft hand for a bias minimize, whether or not in delicately-printed slip clothes with tendrils of cloth fluttering behind because the fashions walked, or a sequence of extra ladylike robes, together with one which was embroidered with floral beading. (However nonetheless sheer: that is the Knwls girl, in any case.)
As for that sense of magnificence? There was the playful contact of a sequence of helmet-like leather-based fascinators, hovering over fashions’ heads like a beetle’s carapace. (The hats had been made by the legendary milliner Stephen Jones, who got here backstage final season to introduce himself to the designers and allow them to know he was a fan of their work.) Elsewhere, the duo discovered themselves trying again to the golden age of couture, with jackets that includes generously proportioned shoulders that referenced Balenciaga’s cocoon coat, or gathered crepe clothes that took their cues from Madame Grès. “It’s a twist on her model, although,” Arsenault cautioned, lest we take the comparability too actually. “It’s in washed materials, and tight and revealing, and carried out with liquid jerseys and florals and spliced-up clothes and these Alaia-inspired hooded clothes, so it’s extra of a twist on her model.”
In a last nod to the style greats there was a bridal look to shut the present—however as soon as once more seen sideways, by means of the Knwls lens. With the boning of the corset constructed by Knowles herself, it was an object lesson within the questions the pair have been contemplating about find out how to take their reverence for trend historical past and convey it into the longer term. The strategies to make the marriage gown could also be centuries previous, however with its lingerie-inspired particulars and the Tencel material practice that trailed behind it, this was very a lot a marriage gown for the 2025 bride. “I feel final season we tried to make it really feel extra mature in a really literal method, by maintaining the styling very pared-back,” Knowles added. “So this season, we wished to take that power and make it really feel extra wealthy, and full. To return to what Knwls is all about, with the layering and the element and the sensuality to it.” On that, they firmly succeeded.
