There's an adage about leopard and snake print never going out of fashion - as such, it makes them hard to reinvent, but Giles has managed it.
Using nothing so obvious as the usual patterns, he patch-worked photo images of them to create a literal big cat print that ran across dresses of all lengths and even came as a woven fringe detailing on one. And his take on snake was a fabulously hyper-real etching of a head and its coils, almost woodcut-like, rendered in metallic blue and emerald on yet more trapeze shift dresses and separates.
That exotic feeling ran through the rest of the collection, a fun but ineffably engineered mix of sequinned claw prints on column dresses and picked out on a knit, laser cut leather featuring jungle scenery and cockatoos, and an opening phase of Pepto-Bismol striped tailoring that set the tone.
But even through the disco vibes and light-hearted, tropical feel, the beauty of Deacon's cutting is seriously elegant. He's a couturier with cartoonist sense of cool.
