“I think it still feels right to be a little bit more low-key,” says Sharon Wauchob on a call. Building on the lightness of her fall lineup, her spring collection approaches ethereality. Yet there’s no danger of this offering coming untethered and floating away into some fashion fantasy realm, because it’s so personal. “I wanted it to be something very sincere and real to me at this stage,” says Wauchob. “What am I doing this for? Because I want to be able to relate to it myself. It’s not just this abstract thing that I’m experimenting with.”
The silhouettes the designer reworked for spring are known to all. The idea, she says, is taking something precious, “but making it really accessible in a raw but special way.” To that end, a T-shirt, rendered in the wispiest silk tulle, is transformed into something as magical as a butterfly wing. Pair it with matching floaty trousers (opaque through the hips) and Wauchob’s take on the piece of the season, the bra top. Hers is a jewel-like constellation of jet-black micro-sequins.
For many years, Wauchob worked in Paris alongside couture artisans, and she’s increasingly exploring the decorative possibilities of handwork in her collections. This season she was thinking about “future heirlooms,” an idea that comes across most directly in a skirt hand-covered in vintage crystals, with little bits of uneven fringe. Making this piece, notes the designer, required a bit of confidence, “because it’s not so delicate, but a little bit ballsy—and I like that as well, you know, being irreverent with something very special.”
But what qualifies as “special” in fashion today? According to street style and the red carpet, in-your-face looks that are colorful, brash, and body-revealing (and perhaps a reaction to the pandemic) seem to be the thing. In contrast, Wauchob, who has always been a proponent of “quiet,” has been asking herself, as she wrote in her show notes, “Are we dressing up for the public gaze—can we?—or are those moments more personal, almost secretive, to share with those closest to us?” This collection contains lots of sheer looks, and ones that are closer to the body, yet they don’t reveal themselves at a glance. The construction of some of the tulle pieces can only be seen, and appreciated, when held up to the light. “[My work has] never ever been about being sexy in the normal sense,” says Wauchob, a self-described feminist.
There is a sort of romanticism to the spring collection, but it’s less to do with aesthetics than with the love affair Wauchob has with her materials and her craft. Just as she worked with petites mains in Paris, so the designer is working with Savile Row–trained tailors now that she’s back in London. The collection needs structured pieces to balance the delicacy of treatments like Fortuny pleats. The presence of the hand on fabric is legible in a silvered antique lamé top. It’s there too in a “suspension dress” (where fabric hangs, quite literally, from a thread) that mirrors the fragile state of the world.
