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LONDON, United Kingdom — Matthew Miller has always been the most politically conscious designer on the London fashion stage, but, just as politics rudely intrudes on the industry in the form of June 23rd's Referendum to leave the European Union, he has backed off the broader statements in favour of something more intimate and abstract.
Freedom? That, of course, is what the Referendum is ultimately about, but Miller was actually thinking about a free spirit in dress, particularly skinheads and punks with their random DIY approach to clothes. Huge safety-pins attached sheets of slogans to the backs of jackets in Saturday’s presentation. So far, so punk, but where once the slogan might have been No Future, this one read Negasonic Teenage Warhead, the title of a 1995 track from an obscure Soundgarden-lite band called Monster Magnet. Something that would once have been punk, now pop, in other words.
That same process was responsible for the collection's finest flourish. Miller grew up with a reproduction of John Constable's 19th century masterwork A Study of Clouds on the wall of his family home. Abstracted and jacquarded, it looked like skinhead splatterbleach in a jacket and jean combination. Pretty in a sky blue, intriguing in a subtle tone-on-tone weave of cotton and linen. It's almost as though while everyone was looking elsewhere, Matthew Miller has become an ingenious craftsman.
