A Culture of Change

I got to know British fashion from afar. I was an editorial assistant in post-9/11 New York, working for an American women’s magazine known for its spirited voice and wonderfully weird approach to style and beauty. This was a time when the publishing, fashion and beauty industries were scrambling to refind their feet in an uncertain economy. My editor encouraged junior members of staff to read the British mags, describing them as cooler and more irreverent than their American, glossy counterparts.

I’d regularly buy copies of British ELLE, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as The Face and i-D – with the odd copy of The World of Interiors mixed in when I could get hold of it – and pore over the features, cover stories and shoots. Imagine my excitement when I eventually moved to London for an editorial role. I brought with me a shopping list of the pieces by British brands I couldn’t find at the go-to retail mecca Barneys New York. My gateway purchase: a pair of black Vivienne Westwood pirate boots, bound by brown leather buckles, from Liberty. That set me off on a course that stretched and wound its way through the 2010s, in search of the perfect Burberry trench, Paul Smith tailoring, Phoebe Philo anything, an Mulberry Alexa Bag, a Kate Moss for Topshop slip dress – things that seemed quintessentially British to me.

As my knowledge grew, my shopping list expanded to accommodate a voluminous Simone Rocha coat the colour of candy floss, a Christopher Kane mini-skirt in acid green leather lace, a floral Preen by Thornton Bregazzi tea dress, and a white cotton Boudicca Wode dress with an accompanying can of perfumed spray paint in cobalt blue (white being the perfect canvas on which to spray the blue fragrance).

I’d look at British fashion and see the woman I wanted to be: boldly free-spirited and wildly creative. Yet hardly any of its designers looked like me. During my early years in London, sitting in the nosebleed seats of the city’s fashion week, the gaping holes were impossible to ignore: a compendium of creative statements celebrating nonconformity on show. But entire swathes of the British experience, and its people, missing.

Where were the Black and Brown designers? The colour, glamour and flavour of its Bangladeshi, Jamaican, Pakistani, Nigerian and Ghanaian communities were entirely missing. Fashion’s picture of Britishness was incomplete.

In her book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging, Afua Hirsch writes: “British history is the multiracial, interracial story of a nation interdependent on trade, cultural influence and immigration from Africa, India, Central and East Asia, and other regions and continents populated by people who are not white.” I longed to see the fullness of Britain’s multifaceted story in the fashion.

I’m writing this as the nation crowns a new monarch, in a post-Brexit era in which the concept of Britishness is being redefined against a backdrop of ever-tightening immigration laws. Meanwhile, in fashion, Britishness as a brand is evolving on the world stage, one dominated by enormous globally recognised luxury labels. What will this mean for its largest creative industry, one worth £26 billion?

A little more than a decade since I first moved to the UK, its landscape of designers has grown to include a more expansive view of what it means to be British. There’s Grace Wales Bonner’s poetic, diasporic men’s and women’s wear; Chet Lo’s playful, sculptural shapes; Saul Nash’s elegant performance wear; Priya Ahluwalia’s mash-up of South Asian and African references; Bianca Saunders’ reflections on Black masculinity; and Feben’s playful femininity. They all add breadth and depth to an ecosystem that includes well-loved pillars (Erdem, JW Anderson, ROKSANDA, Emilia Wickstead and more) and rising stars (16Arlington, Sinéad O’Dwyer and Nensi Dojaka, to name a few.) The way it should be.

How wonderful to see British fashion’s community of designers slowly beginning to reflect the spectrum of its society. The most modern thing it can do. Long may it last.