Sunday afternoon saw a mixture of light showers, heavy showers and bursts of sunshine. Appropriate then, that we found ourselves in a rainbow world, high above the BFC tent at London Fashion Week in a wing of grand Somerset House. Fred Butler, who has long been making rather fabulous accessories in every shade of the rainbow, was holding her first ever on-schedule presentation, after quite a few seasons of exhibiting and last season, a fashion film. We weren’t quite sure what to expect, but it was magical, much more like an art installation that a fashion show.
Four models, each wearing one rainbow tone stood on coloured lily pads, each decked out in a teeny neoprene romper suit and then a succession on amazing rainbow accessories, tubular jackets, headdresses and tonal stilettoes customised with tiny circles. The static models combined with the lily and eerie sound effects composed by Patrick Wolf (after all the clothes Fred has made for him over the years) conspired to create an alien world which we were all invited to. The assembled press and fashionistas with their digital cameras and phones all suddenly looked very drab and monochromatic compared the models.
Zandra and her assistant Melissa
We caught up with Zandra Rhodes (looking ANYTHING but drab, we hasten to add) to ask how she came to be at the presentation; ‘Well, I’m here with my friend [the milliner] Piers Atkinson – who’s presentation I’ve just seen. He said to me, now you know you mustn’t miss Fred’s show. So here I am.’ And what do you think of it, Zandra? ‘I think it’s rather wonderful’
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
- Naomi Attwood
