Snuggled sleepy and serene against the chest of her father, Molly Goddard’s 11-week-old daughter was arguably the most impactful influencer at her mother’s show this afternoon. That’s because it was her arrival into the world that punctuated the process of preparing this collection, and which obliged Goddard to condense her usual gestation from creative conception to runway reveal. As she put it: “I’ve had to consolidate. And I’ve realised, having stepped away and then come back when the things that I designed at the beginning were more finalised, that it’s really good to stick with the thing that I want to do at the beginning of planning a collection, which is often when I feel most confident about it.”
The result was undiluted Goddard. The designer confessed there was no great agenda behind her choice of the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society as her venue, but the room’s frayed, very English dignity—and the Ivon Hitchens mural that dominates it —very much complemented her work. Also appropriately, Goddard was throwing shapes: painstakingly engineered forms in taffeta, tulle, and knit were laid atop each other to create fundamentally abstract material sculptures. Sometimes, Goddard said, she felt “they were so ugly they are beautiful,” as if she worried that some looks only their mother could love. This seemed harsh. Instead, by leaning deep into her core palette—red, orange, magenta, pink—she worked expertly to scoop gorgeously unorthodox forms of multi-textural worn gelato around her models. Often the silhouettes were most interesting when seen side-on, as bulbous layers of colored ruffled tulle with different weights and springiness moved up against the off-beat of their wearers’ walks: the hallucinogenic Terry Riley tune on the soundtrack only amplified the sense of carefully curated color-saturated dissonance that this collection rendered. The bags were lovable scrunches of frill in more taffeta.
The one aside to this collection’s central exercise in merging textures and form was a reference to Western wear based on her algorithmically-curated eBay suggestions for clothes for her children. Goddard has often referred back to the clothes of her youth, and now is adding the clothes of her youths to that mix to simultaneously blend her nostalgia with its anticipation for her offspring. Here piped and floral decorated double-face knit faux Western shirts were placed against similarly decorated denim and flat round-toed ballet-cowboy boots.
“It’s all about the craft,” observed Goddard. This collection spoke volumes.
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