Three Emerging Designers Celebrating Shape And Drape In London

By Laura Hawkins

The Brazilian butt lift, the Brazilian tanga bikini bottom, the Brazilian wax... a host of lithe and lifted idealised body standards spring subconsciously to mind when you think of the women soaking up the sun on Copacabana Beach. When Karoline Vitto was growing up in Caçador, a small city in southern Brazil, in the late ’90s and 2000s, the female figures she saw on the Victoria's Secret catwalk, in local soap operas and on US reality television felt impossibly unrealistic. But after moving to London in 2017, to study at both Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, a visit to the Ladies Ponds on Hampstead Heath freed the fashion designer from her muscular-yet-curvaceous expectations."For the first time I felt like I could look like whatever I want to," she enthuses.

Women are fed inventive wardrobe tricks for concealing the areas of the body they take most issue with, but through the namesake label Vitto founded in 2020, the designer is intent on celebrating those rolls, folds and wrinkles. For her spring/summer 2023 runway debut as part of Fashion East, Vitto sent out an inclusive army of women in a joyful spectrum of body sizes – including British breakout star Alva Claire – in cut-out minidresses and bralettes, tube skirts and spaghetti-strap dresses. Vitto's supportive and sculpting jersey creations, designed for body sizes between a UK size 8 and 28, feature twisting metal hardware accents that frame, rather than conceal, an armpit bulge, a curve of the breast, a handful of hip flesh. "Just like jewellery accentuates areas of the body, the metal elements bring attention to areas we feel self-conscious about," she says.

The sampling mannequin in Vitto's southeast London studio is not of stereotypical small proportions, but a UK size 16, the middling body shape within the range her brand offers. Vitto is emphatic about the importance of testing her creations on women of varying proportions, as for her the skin is as important a fabric as the deadstock crepe and cotton she incorporates. "I normally start by thinking about how much of the body is going to be shown or contoured." Her form-flaunting Barely There twisted tops are bestsellers.

Vitto found casting the models for her spring/summer 2023 show the most joyful element of her collection process. "Some of the girls were street cast, others I’d been following on Instagram for a long time," she says. "I can't wait for bigger shows in the future, featuring even more amazing women."

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Model Bibi Abdulkadir, who wears cotton-poplin halter dress, cotton-knit knickers, and backless brogues, at Browns and Ssense.com, is dressed by Talia Lipkin-Connor, who founded her label Talia Byre.

Taste-testing your way around London's most iconic restaurants is a surprising catwalk collection-devising activity, but for Talia Lipkin-Connor, à la carte dining is akin to designing. For her debut catwalk show, held adjacent to Frieze London in October 2022, she invited guests to Sweetings, the 19th century-founded fish and oyster bar in the City, where, nestled on wooden tables inside the restaurant's close-knit rooms, they dined decadently on battered fish and chips, sticky toffee pudding and Black Velvet cocktails.

"I was thinking about the communal concept of breaking bread," enthuses the Warrington-originating designer, who founded her drape-and-knit-focused, form-and-movement-celebrating womenswear label, Talia Byre, at home during lockdown in 2020, after graduating with an MA from Central Saint Martins. She was enchanted by the intimacy and informality of Gaby Aghion's first show for Chloé, showcased in 1956 over croissants and café au lait at Parisian institution, and long-time haunt of both A-listers and artistes, Café de Flore. "The black-and-white pictures of people just tucking in are amazing," she says.

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The brand's third collection – inspired by the escapism of exotic holidays, the magentas and acid greens of tropical foliage, superfine cotton knits scrunched up into suitcases, and cardigans, tube dresses and soft corsetry dunk-washed in the sea – didn't swerve family opinion. "We had this weird post-show debrief in the back room of Sweetings," Lipkin-Connor says. It's unsurprising considering she harks from a lineage of tailors and clothing purveyors. Her great-uncle owned the now-shuttered ladieswear boutique Lucinda Byre in Liverpool, which Lipkin-Connor's mother and grandmother worked in from the ’60s to late ’80s. The patterns of decades-spanning relics and hand-me-downs are panelled and patchworked into Talia Byre's tactile designs.

For spring/summer ’23, an old Lucinda Byre cardigan inspired an asymmetric button-up sweater, paired with a draped miniskirt. "I’m obsessed with that idea of a knitted twinset. Taking classic pieces and updating them for now," Lipkin-Connor says. Imagined in Isabelline, a "dirty cream" that supposedly derives from the name of a Spanish princess who, in 1601, refused to wash her garments until her husband returned from a siege, it highlights her obsession with colour. "We also built the palette around Helen Frankenthaler's instinctive watercolours," she says. As for the possibility of another gastronomic show location, Lipkin-Connor will be consulting her extensive compilation of London restaurants. "There were so many hot debates about menus," she says, laughing. Our taste buds are already tingling.

Model Ka Wai wears a viscose-jersey gown with chrome body adornment, next to Standing Ground founder Michael Stewart.

Michael Stewart grew up immersed in the power of ancient relics. His rural family home in East Clare, western Ireland, is overshadowed by a hill that was the location of a prehistoric hillfort. "I like the idea of elemental forms," explains the founder of womenswear label Standing Ground, who for his first collection looked to the configurations of standing stones – megalithic monuments speculated to have been used as boundary markers or signify burial sites. "Those untouched and folkloric constructions look like figures in the landscape," he says.

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For Stewart's debut London presentation, staged as part of Fashion East, 10 statuesque female figures stood against the paint-stripped pillars of a warehouse space, the graceful fluidity of their draped jersey gowns – in naturalistic mustard and walnut, pistachio and crimson – materialising in masterfully constructed contrast to the industrial location. Stewart's designs, figure-celebrating, floor-sweeping and with sensual cut-outs, featured padded bands that wrapped around the body like twisting roots of trees or the tendrils of an alien creature. Hand-honed fibreglass hardware resembled chunks of primordial treasure buried underground or a cosmic metal akin to Black Panther's vibranium. "My work leans into the ancient and futuristic," Stewart says. "It's really about playing between the two."

Yet Stewart is emphatic that for red-carpet styling success contemporaneity is key. "It's very difficult to make eveningwear look modern," he says of a dressing space that can err towards pastiche or costume. The designer places focus on a purity of form and fabric. He doesn't sketch, but drapes directly with viscose or silk jersey onto a mannequin or the body. "This approach is the handwriting of my work," he says. It was a year spent working in frantically paced high-street fashion design studios, after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2017, that cemented Stewart's desire to work with a time-honed conscientiously paced momentum. "I’m less interested in the fashion industry than developing my own craft processes," he says.

Standing Ground's silhouettes may meditate on Irish superstition, Hellenic classicism, the ’50s jersey dresses of Madame Grès and the otherworldly outfits of the future, but for Stewart narrative is meaningless without excellence in design execution. "It doesn't matter how good my story is if the skill and the quality isn't spot on."

By Alex Kessler