You can always count on Emilia Wickstead for gorgeous event dressing options. But this season she drew inspiration from the low-key glamour and burgeoning garçon sensibility of French Riviera style in the 1930s for a collection that featured mainly daywear, including some great menswear-inspired tailoring.
Wickstead’s show notes opened with an epigraph from photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue on Renée Perle: ‘Around her I see a halo of magic.’ Perle is known mainly as the frequent subject of his abstract portraits, although she was herself a painter. By examining the lives of some the era’s female artists who more successfully emerged from the shadows of their famous romantic partners like Françoise Gilot (Picasso) and Lee Miller (May Ray), Wickstead used the collection to question why only women are characterised as muses.
The Venue:
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Wickstead staged her SS24 show at the Royal Academy of Arts, a venue that felt germane to the collection’s art world focus.
The Music:
The soundtrack featured rousing strings, including Shigeru Umebayashi’s theme for the Wong Kar-wai film 2046.
The Front Row:
London’s creative class always turns out for an Emilia Wickstead show. Erin O’Connor, Nicola Coughlan, and Shalom Brune-Franklin had a sweet moment together on the FROW.
The Collection:
Drenched in the colours of the Mediterranean, the collection’s vibrant colour palette included terra cotta, ochre, lemon, and azure, sometimes seen all together in painterly stripes on bias cut maxi dress and coordinating sets. Thigh skimming dresses that looked perfect for throwing on for lunch after swim featured dreamy floral prints. Most unexpected were the tailoring bits: fluid pleat front trousers and oversize shorts, which Wickstead said her female artists might have borrowed from their muses.
