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The weather—and, granted, the general atmosphere—in London isn’t the brightest right now, with the city blighted by sopping cold. It was perhaps this somewhat bleak backdrop that made the show put on by John Alexander Skelton—an off-the-radar (or at least off-the-schedule) sleeper-hit of a designer—such a poignantly warming affair.
Staged in the halls of an East London church laden with evergreen foliage and lit candles, the air perfumed by scorched yew and mulled cider, it began with a red-headed fiddler in a wide-set gray pinstripe suit—with rolled trouser hems and turned-up peak lapels—playing a festive ditty. The feeling that you’d walked into something like a rowdy sailor’s jig in Victorian Cornwall was compounded by the cast of characters that filed around the hall. Silver-haired dandies and younger, musclebound rogues—fixtures of a John Alexander Skelton cast—stepped onto the stage with druidic straw hats covering their faces, removing them to reveal their world-weathered faces and walk the room in seemingly roughly-hewn, but at closer glance exquisitely wrought garments.
Suiting came in mottled burgundy, gray, and charcoal felt, invariably cut to elegantly slouch on the body and with jaunty, irregular plackets that imparted a palpable sense of handcraft. Shirts came in expected écru linens, but also in a foppish floral damask, as did a pair of trousers. Together they lent the show a flair of eccentricity that made these characters feel all the more plausible. There was a sense a levity, too; Skelton is evidently a seriously talented designer, but he doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously
That much was made clear at the show’s close, which—in lieu of the usual single-file parade—saw the cast yomp about the hall arm-in-arm to the rhythmic claps of the grinning crowd. While the suspension of disbelief was slightly allayed by the anxiety that came of watching burly men draped in swathes of felt bundle past tables laden with open flames, it nonetheless made for one of the most spirited fashion show spectacles that this reviewer has been present for in a while. “I sought deliverance to an imaginative idyllic state in which I could create clothing that could also hold the power to hopefully enrapture and ultimately transport,” Skelton said. With this show, that he did.
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