On Wednesday evening, Harris Reed kicked off London Fashion Week two days early with a meditation on the campiness of Old Hollywood glamour. It may have officially been the final day of New York Fashion Week according to the fashion calendar, but after a whirlwind 24-hour trip across the pond for a Nina Ricci launch event, the multi-tasking young creative was back in the capital and raring to go.
The Venue:
Breaking with the unconventional formats of his past LFW outings, the designer opted to show his spring/summer 2024 Harris Reed collection on an actual runway. Arriving at the Tanks at the Tate Modern — where last season he staged a theatre in the round performance emceed by Florence Pugh — guests found the concrete-clad underground gallery space lined with rows of standard-issue Fashion Week benches. Of course, this being a Harris Reed production that’s about where the similarities with a prototypical fashion show featuring stone-faced models stomping up and down a catwalk end.
The Music:
In a callback to Reed’s early tableaux vivants presentations featuring live soundtracks by Adam Lambert, Sam Smith, and Kelsey Lu, the show began in near-total darkness, with a single spotlight tracking Cosima as she traversed the runway singing a haunting acoustic rendition of Radiohead’s alt-rock anthem “Creep.” As the house lights came up, the singer-songwriter took her place by a white piano and also performed the Janis Ian ballad “Stars.”
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The Casting:
Supermodel Ashley Graham opened in a black maxi skirt and bustier made from deadstock velvet, waist snatched in with head-embellished corset covered in champagne-gold bugle beads. Taking cues from movement director Simon Donnellon, she led a procession of 10 models in Reed’s signature 8-inch platforms. They appeared to slowly glide down the runway as though they were moving through honey, all while hitting poses.
Gender fluidity is an ever-present theme in Reed’s work, and that this show featured many cis and trans women, while others have skewed more masc is due to the genius of Reed’s casting director Nachum Shonn. In his show notes, Reed quoted from Orlando, Virginia Woolfe’s novel about a time traveling poet who interrogates the relationship between clothing and gender presentation: “Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness.”
The Front Row:
Guests included actresses Maisie Williams and Charithra Chandran, singers Jacob Lusk and Sekou, and models and trans activists Maxim Magnus and Munroe Bergdorf.
The Collection:
To keep the focus on the body, Reed didn’t show any of his signature attention-grabbing halo hats on the runway. Milliner Vivienne Lake did contribute one feathered topper with a tall rounded crown and jeweler Missoma made silver and pearl breast cups.
Corsetry was a key motif throughout the mostly black-and-white collection, including a pointed bodice paired with bell-bottoms, a plunge body-shaper worn with a mermaid skirt, and an exaggerated corset that spread wing-like above a pair of bumsters. Reed explored the paradoxical way that women’s undergarments that impose structure and rigidity — attributes classically defined as masculine — also dramatize so-called feminine curves.
