This tightly edited collection may not have had the same wow factor as Reed’s past shows, but that didn’t matter. Reed is just as gifted at design as he is at entertaining.
For fall, the British American designer and creative director of Nina Ricci swapped the hollow industrialist halls of the Tate Modern for its older and more traditional brother, Tate Britain.
“This season I really wanted to focus on the clothes; I’ve always loved the idea of the old and the new,” Reed said about his seventh collection.
He drew inspiration from Victorian paper dolls and turned botanical wallpaper into fabric. “I tried to find an interesting angle with sustainability by sponging the wallpaper for months and then literally repurposing it into exaggerated corsetry and jackets,” Reed said.
Other looks included an off-the-shoulder minidress in teal with gold vines; a dress with a large embroidered peony design made up of a million stitches on a single panel, and an exaggerated collar that acts as a halo.
A string quartet serenaded the audience, with a deadly and dramatic staccato straight out of a Victorian gothic novel.
The wallpaper was sourced from Fromental, a design studio in north London that specializes in wallcoverings and was cofounded by Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes.
“These are all pieces from the last 20 years of our business, our favorite archive and experimental pieces. Meeting with Harris, we went through and opened up that archive and turned it into this tonight, [which] is really quite exceptional,” said Butcher.
“Once a paper has been used or if it’s just been shown, then it just sits in a warehouse studio for years and never used again — these are pieces that have been embroidered from the finest silks for hundreds of hours,” added Deshayes.
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