“I wanted there to be a clunkiness to it, and a messiness, and to slow down the pace and give everything a bit more breathing room.” Now an established star in the London fashion constellation—with a consistent, solid business there to provide gravity—Molly Goddard can dictate her own pace. She added: “When I start a collection, it’s sketches, silhouettes, fabrics, textures: we swatch fabric samples and work out frills, and frills in different fabrics, and the combination of prints. I love clashing prints, clashing colours, and clashing textures.”
Goddard did deliver the explosively expansive and colourful tulle dresses that fuelled her meteoric rise, but they came later in a show that was served in four phases, purposely disjointed against the soundtrack. This was in order, she indicated, to echo the unchoreographed organic spontaneity of pre-internet red carpet dressing.
We started with a series of dresses and a skirt whose sumptuous silhouettes belied the purposeful plainness of their fabric, a calico-toned cotton she said was there to echo the toiles that are her starting point when realising designs. Cut in jersey, some epically ruffled pink gowns with demonstrative darting at the torso were later experiments in this contrast between silhouette and material.
Goddard’s cutesy ‘Twinky’ print returned, printed on knitwear, mesh and denim sometimes worn under a layer of contrasting opaque tulle. The models wore colourful Spanish-made cowboy boots and shoes and carried ruffled bags. Menswear featured shrunken-proportioned tailoring, some frill-edged; colour-drenched aran knit hoodies; and a handsomely shirred high-waisted bomber. There was also a full-length pinstripe skirt.
The fireworks phase arrived in a salvo of retina-drenching intensely-coloured tulle dresses, sometimes worn against casual shirting in powerfully complementary tones; pink v orange, green v purple. Full length dresses in lemon or lime tulle came over bee-striped underwear. Then we circled back to that toile-referencing starting point. Three final high-volume silhouettes in not-quite-white concluded this expertly orchestrated exercise in high-impact contrast between colour, fabric, texture, and shape.
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