This was one of those rare, impossible-to-stop-watching shows during which your phone warns you that you’re running dangerously low on storage. Ashish Gupta might not be the most fashionable of fashion designers on the London schedule—he’s been around way too long to ever be the next big thing—but he absolutely ranks among the very best.
This show illustrated precisely why: here is a designer who possesses not only an instinctual litmus for cultural atmosphere, but also the capacity to meaningfully react to it through the creation of artful, soulful fashion. As he outlined in a show note poem entitled Autobiography of a Dress, this collection was meant as “an antidote to anti-boats,” a gesture of resistance above and beyond this particular moment of dismal social division, both in the UK and beyond.
The show was cooked up with performance artist Linder Sterling. Together they put out a casting call for dancers, and whittled down the 300 respondents to around 40. As Gupta rightly observed backstage: “I was terrified because dance shows can be a little bit cringe.” To give the performance a bit of structure, he and Sterling determined that it should be shaped around the notion of this being the last party in the world: “And that’s kind of where the concept came from.”
As well as being a wonderful advertisement for the elasticity of his garments in the face of extreme movement, the show was emotionally moving. “You have to remember what you are fighting for,” said Gupta. “It’s like something that Arundhati Roy wrote: ‘you have to seek joy in the saddest of places.’” The models, freed to dance like it was their last time on the floor, threw shapes as diversely individual as they were: once they had completed the circuit around the spotlit runway they gathered in its center to keep on moving.
The collection was mostly drawn in sequins, the shiny building block of Gupta’s signature practice. Across a wide range of party-ready garments for men and women these sequins came choreographed in check, tie-dye, Shibori and other patterns which, as the designer observed, have all evolved across time, borders and cultures. The collection also included a few pieces, including the funkily colored faux furs, plucked from the designer’s upcoming collaboration with UK retailer Debenham’s: hats off to them for having the sense to hitch their wagon to Ashish.
Although this collection and show was called Fresh Hell after the atmosphere Gupta and Sterling were kicking against, watching it was heavenly. I personally have an extremely low tolerance for fashion shows that incorporate dance—they often really do make you cringe— but this was an awesome exception. Backstage, wearing one of the Fashion Not Fascism T-shirts created with artist Rachel Louise Hodgson, Gupta said: “The point of it was to say we’re not going to be sad about this shit: we’re going to fight.”
