Meadham Kirchhoff

Posted Tuesday, 24th February '09 18:48

Last season's Meadham Kirchhoff collection preempted Autumn/Winter's obsession with armorial constructs - witness the duo's plated, patched and laced jeans and bleached-out denim doublets, hard sells at the time but suddenly looking just the ticket. This season there was similar excitement to see where the team would take those ideas as fashion seems to be turning in their favour. Looking back to their beginnings as a menswear label, the first looks were based around deconstructed mens tailoring: interfacing fluffed from external darts, edged were left raw and unravelling and stitching was exposed, like a work in progress. Trousers were patchworked with copper-wire brocades, the rough pieces then re-embroidered and strewn with crystals like the disintegrating leftovers of once-precious garments. These modes of distress naturally reference grunge and the anti-glamour movements of the early nineties: apt really, as we are seemingly moving on (finally) from the popular revival of that Versace-clad flash-trash era. Developing the moth-eaten chantilly-lace overlaid shirts of lace season, Meadham Kirchhoff created layered shrouds of linen and cheesecloth, razored, shredded and superimposed. To contrast with this, their tailoring - neat nylon puffas and classic quilted leather bombers - was deconstructed not into shreds, but into great, abstract swathes of cloth, hitching up and folding into itself behind what at first glance appeared to be conventional garments. Other simpler cotton chemises were strapped and lashed with leatherwork bridles to hug the shoulders, trussing the loose, billowing cotton shirts against the body. We got the point that this was a monochrome, monotone and overall rather po-faced excursion in fabric abstraction - a hefty and rather heavy conceptual statement about stereotypes of conventional beauty, perhaps? That's not to say it's not without appeal: a move away from overworked polish into something rather more low-key means that these hand-worked, dirtied and dishevelled pieces suddenly look all the more genuine, and genuinely desirable.