fashion

Date:   9/19/2016 10:16:32 PM ( 8 y ago)

Christopher Kane and his partner and sister-in-arms, Tammy, celebrate their momentous 10 years in business today. It’s been a decade since, at age 23, he lit up a runway in London’s Holland Park with a blast of tiny, neon-bright lace and elastic body-con dresses—a sexy, precociously accomplished collection that electrified a generation of girls who saw a new way to prom dresses london up and show off. Kane had just graduated with a master’s degree from Central Saint Martins, where he was taught by the late, legendary fashion educator Professor Louise Wilson, when he and Tammy, his co-conspirator and fit model, whipped up ideas from their student digs in the East End. Since that moment, his ability to deal out jolts of innovation, most of them somehow springing from his small-town Scottish childhood, has kept fashion viewers riveted.

Here, he shares a fast-forward video made of runway show stills fused from wildly unpredictable origins: dinosaurs, child beauty pageants, school uniforms, Princess Margaret, Japanese Yakuza tattoos, Priscilla Presley, Frankenstein, brain scans, cults, craft-fair hobbies, astronomy, botany, library books, car crashes, and hoarders (to name but a few).

On a break from preparing the Spring 2017 collection at the label’s East End studio (which has grown to take over several floors since investment from Kering came in 2013), Christopher and Tammy Kane discuss the lessons learned building a resourceful sibling enterprise, which started from next to nothing. (And if you’re wondering, tomorrow he’ll be showing a few reprises of the lacy, frilly body-dresses that first made his name.)

In 2006, everything happened for you: your graduation collection, which won you the Harrods’s year prize, and immediately winning New Gen sponsorship to show during London Fashion Week. What do you remember most?

CHRISTOPHER: I count my MA show as the most pivotal for me. The first show was brilliant because then it was out globally. But the MA was the most important to me because it really brought me out of my shell. Louise was so driven, she got the best out of you. I’d separated myself off working at home. I was so scared to show Louise, for the reason that mine didn’t look like anything anyone else was doing. It looked like a little tray of chocolates, or poodles! I’ll never forget going into her office. It was like a film noir moment: The blinds were down, the spotlight was on, it was during the day, and I had the skinniest model, a beanpole of a girl, and Louise was smoking. She looked over and said, “That’s f**king amazing—make another six.”

TAMMY: And, meanwhile, I was on the phone to Chris, and he was like, “Oh my god, Tammy! She loves them. We need to make another six!”

Does that feel like a long time ago?

CHRISTOPHER: It does and it doesn’t. Things from that moment fell into place, but we had no idea how it was going to explode.

When did you get your first order?

TAMMY: The first order was probably in October 2006.

CHRISTOPHER: It was Tammy and I doing the sales.

You took an apartment in Paris–explain what that was like?

CHRISTOPHER: Don’t! Someone put up the address of this apartment on the British Fashion Council website. It was like a shoe box. I remember moving in there. It got to the stage where we didn’t answer the doorbell; we were just hiding.

TAMMY: Buyers were at the door day and night, and we couldn’t afford models, so I was standing there in the clothes, as well as trying to fill out orders, trying to tell people they couldn’t buy them because we could only produce so much, and their tongues were just wagging. They said, “Darling, we will have these clothes!”

CHRISTOPHER: That happened so many times with the early shows. Tammy and I would do everything. Sales, lugging things about up 20 flights of stairs. There were no elevators, so we had to carry everything about with us.

TAMMY: The first time we went to Tokyo for Comme des Garçons, we got to the airport with so many suitcases, and everything was so heavy. We made all those collections out of heavy materials: leather, basically cowhide.

CHRISTOPHER: We were basically carrying around a herd of cattle with us. It was all the metalwear too—the big diamond Swarovski stones. It weighed a ton.

That was your second collection, and the velvet was heavy too—it was an amazing show, though! Tell me about those Swarovski stones you used.

CHRISTOPHER: They were essentially bathroom fittings: door handles, knobs, and things. We saw them and loved them.

TAMMY: They refused to make the settings for us. But we were so determined to find them that we found a model-maker in Whitechapel, who provided us with our leather, to make the plastic settings for us in his spare time.

You went out, did the persuading, made the relationships with manufacturers, Tammy. What was very striking was that you did it all around London. That was really important, because in former generations so many young designers had fallen by trying to use manufacturers abroad.

TAMMY: We were really terrified of using suppliers because we heard so many scary stories, but actually, we’re very, very resourceful.

CHRISTOPHER: At college, I made my own dresses out of stockings from a market, when everyone else was buying really expensive fabric. I thought, “Well, I can’t afford that.” My dresses would cost £5 in total, but that’s what we had to do. Then going on, we used pongees [silks] from local suppliers in Hoxton Square.

Where did you source the hardware in your first collection?

TAMMY: The rings came from Dalston.

CHRISTOPHER: Those guys loved us; they thought “ker-ching” when we walked in because we’d ask for a hundred rings and lots of leather.

TAMMY: The plastic clips came from the market in Soho as well.

CHRISTOPHER: I dyed a lot. The red, the baby blue, and then I had that gray. I loved the gray because I wanted it to be a really weird gray color. The nude, fortunately, I found. These beautiful nudes. That was the first dress, the nude-y one.

They were Falke tights you cut up and sewed into dresses?

TAMMY: Yes, and we’re using Falke again this season!

I think that’s a really good lesson to young designers—that you can make something from almost nothing. For anyone who wants to follow in your footsteps, what would your advice be?

CHRISTOPHER: I’d tell them to always look back to their BA and MA dresses because that’s when you’re so raw and you can make anything beautiful and amazing, new, and different. You’re so determined then.

TAMMY: I think people should take their time and take baby steps, across the board with everything—with cash flow, with supply chain. It’s so easy to overtrade and get into so much trouble. It’s probably still really easy to overtread.

CHRISTOPHER: You’ve got to do it because you love it, and you want to do something different. You have to want to really blow people away, and even if they love it or hate it, at least they’re going to go away with something newly impregnated in their brain. Not just another oversize hoodie top. Yes, that works and it sells, but I don’t want to see another one!

After all this time, and all the surprises and changes you put into your collections, do you have a constant definition of what Christopher Kane is as a label?

CHRISTOPHER: We’re always about new, innovative techniques. We want to involve our childhood in our work. We’re always looking back to look forward. You can then always instantly recognize, “That’s Christopher Kane,” before you’re even in the room.

There is a Christopher Kane girl, isn’t there?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, there definitely is. She can be anything and everything. She’s ageless in a sense. She has so many personalities, and we’ve never had a mood board or muses. She’s always adapting and evolving with the time. She’s a feeling and a spirit.

How much is she you, Tammy?

TAMMY: I think I’ve got lots of different traits to my personality. Even if I’m working on something with Chris, and I absolutely love it, I might not wear it. Most of the time I will, but since I’ve had my little girl, Bonnie, I can’t, but I know that I would. It’s like a feeling in me; I put myself in a room, and think how I’m going to feel in it. I always want our clothes to stand out in a room, and that I’d wear them with a real sense of pride.

CHRISTOPHER: There’s so much work and power behind them, and for us they’re so personal and mean a lot. In a sense, they are quite intellectual, because they come from a really deep-rooted childhood made into something big and elevated. I’m always proud of our collections.

Isn’t it incredible how much can come out of a childhood, those few short years of early life?

CHRISTOPHER: It’s channeling that inner child. Sometimes you don’t even know. It just comes out and you’re like, “Oh.”

TAMMY: It’s endless. Also, we’re so proud of our working-class roots and family. Our mum and dad worked their asses off to make a better life for us. My dad cycled to Glasgow, which was miles away from where we lived, so he could go to night classes and study engineering while holding down a full-time job. He then set up his own business, and he had a real entrepreneurial sense about him. And my mum was a real grafter too. She was a cleaner, a dinner lady; these are things that people are ashamed to admit. We’re not. I love that. So much goodness has come from it.

CHRISTOPHER: My mum’s uniform at school was brilliant; it was gingham. Gingham can be put into completely different contexts, poor and rich. Our aunties were all strong, independent, funny people, and just really normal.

It’s also the Scottish, isn’t it? What about the strand of Scottishness? It’s very strong, isn’t it?

CHRISTOPHER: Yeah, I think in every season there’s a real fighting spirit within us, and that is a very Scottish mentality. We also never show off, and that’s a real sense of, “No, don’t be like that,” real humble pie. I hate that about people when they act like that.

The other thing you’ve always been about, though, the word luxury is abused, but your clothes never looked cheap and student-y. You were reaching high.

TAMMY: Even when Chris came out of college, we knew who we wanted to compete with. It was Prada, it was Rei, it was Nicolas Ghesquière. We knew who we were up against. We never said it out loud because we didn’t want to sound ridiculous, but that was who we thought of as our competitors.

CHRISTOPHER: We actually aimed super high.

After 10 years, what’s your favorite part of it all? What gives you the most satisfaction, the point you know what you’re in it for?

CHRISTOPHER: The chills. The moment you know they both love you and hate you at the same time. I get it then. Those moments happen all the time.

TAMMY: I think this 10-year anniversary coming up has only just recently dawned on us, really. But there’s a 10-year archive now, which we can cherry-pick. It feels so good. It’s all our own.

Read more:http://www.marieprom.co.uk/celebrity-dresses-red-carpet-dresses

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