While Theresa May is still looking for a way to form a new government after the Conservatives got a blow at last week's general elections, the British fashion industry is desperately on the lookout for young and fresh blood with the radical, rebellious and cutting edge power of Alexander McQueen. Most critics seem to have found the new sacrificial victim in Charles Jeffrey Loverboy.
A graduate of Central Saint Martins' BA course who started his eponymous "Loverboy" club nights three years ago, Jeffrey – now 26 – seems to have revamped a dead connection, the link between fashion and nightlife that spawned creative minds à la Leigh Bowery.
The young designer has that penchant for fun and dressing up that the fashion industry – mainly focused on selling and making money – lost a long time ago, that's the main reason why most critics are betting on him.
In January Jeffrey sent out on the runway of Topman's MAN initiative giant papier-mâché monsters/deities by set designer Gary Card, but, for his first stand-alone show during London Fashion Week: Men's (promoted by a video by his friend, the visual artist Jenkin van Zyl featuring ten new fashion rules inspired by the strict entry rules in nightclubs), he had dancers wrecking havoc on the runway wearing childish creations made with pink painted cardboard.
The designs were a mix of crazy inspirations and ideas: there was a fun crocheted flower appliqued on a lace thong; there were stripes and graphic smiles; tartan suits and baby doll dresses; trompe l'oeil Hussar jackets that replicated the pirate & poet look favoured by Adam Ant; pannier skirts and Elizabethan doublets (this is not the first time Jeffrey sent them out on his runway…), bondage pants, a yellow floor-length leather mac and T-shirts with plays on newspaper headlines such as "Children high on drink and drugs", that called to mind the notorious tabloid headlines from raving times about children high on ecstasy cannibalistically eating live pigeons.
The legs and face of the first model were covered in scribbles as if behind the scenes, rather than using make up, they had been joyously playing with boxes of Crayolas; twins in red and blue glasses in short knitted tops wore instead bizarre earrings that looked like mini toilet paper dispensers.
It was as if Jeffrey had jumped on a time machine and borrowed, took, copied and remixed from one century and the next. As a whole the collection was an escapist dream rooted in Vivienne Westwood's historical and pirate dreams and John Galliano's Incroyables with some Walter van Beirendonck added in and with eyes firmly on the London club scene without forgetting iconic fashion figures à la Schiaparelli (see the final white gown with the lobster and with Jeffrey's trademark foxes and scorpions).
The results of Jeffrey's runways are usually the results of a collaborative effort as the designer usually works with performance director Theo Adams, costume designers Gary Card and Jack Appleyard, print designer Richard Quinn and seamstress Sybil Rouge.
Yet "Loverboy the club night" quite often prevails on "Loverboy the label": Jeffrey may have worked with the Savile Row tailors Chittleborough & Morgan, but tailoring skills and fabric knowledge seem to disappear on his runway in favour of extreme joyful ebullience.
Besides, while he is currently the glittery sensation in a dull London still haunted by the ghosts of its past glories, his runways do not seem to have generated the sort of ideas you used to see in a club or in a music video and that you wanted to immediately copy (think Boy George's hairstyle or hats at the time of Culture Club, or Bros' shoes decorated with Grolsch bottle caps…).
For the time being, Jeffrey spreads ebullient joy with his satirical shows (the press release accompanying the S/S 18 collection mentioned reality as "an absurd satire of itself", and people "dancing in the face of threats to freedom") that have become must see for their anger, fun, genderless utopia (you certainly can't complain about diversity missing in Jeffrey's shows), and the sort of energy lacking in many other shows.
Blurring the boundaries between the runway and the dance floor is all fine, yet, if Jeffrey genuinely wants to revamp the fashion scene rather than just London's nightclub subculture and bring back British eccentricity to the forefront of fashion, he will have to seriously start working with manufacturing companies. Sadly, real life is not just a nightclub and it's better if he realises it as soon as possible before the fashion industry gets tired and starts looking for even younger blood…
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