london fashion week faint magazine

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LONDONFASHIONWEEKPORTRAITS

LENSED BY

DAVID YEO

WORDS BY DAISY DUMAS

it’s September. The end of an-other all-too-short bright and sweaty summer in Lon-

fresh pinches of autumn are begin-ning to creep into the mornings.

A number 6 double-decker sweeps by and dissolves into Aldwych’s curved, theatrical

tall, androgynous girl giggles.

The streets – these streets – are

over - for hundreds of years. The gum-trodden pavements have seen all there is to know in

footsteps, the sounds of a billion stories and the lights of lives and lives played out in these worn, homely concourses.

Where a young Elizabeth, cour-tesans, nobility, plumed horses and ladies-in-waiting once trod, now comes a more earthly pro-cession: ripped tights, cotton shirts, leather shoes, doffed hats and woollen coats. Plastic sun-glasses, leggings, piercings and leopard print.

And where once those who en-tered Somerset House did so on strictly regal business, an alto-gether different breed of gentry

and columned passages: fash-ion’s royal set. Designers, styl-ists, fans, students, the hungry, celebrities, artists, wannabes.

Inside, hallowed catwalks cut a path through the sight of a hard-ened set of career voyeurs. And whilst beauty and vision thrill the hard-to-please, make no mis-take: money fuels this engine.

On the streets, though, is where ideas and creativity really come alive. The pavements host the living, breathing embodiment of fashion and its heartbeat is not

locked behind doors and blink-ered by guest lists.

It’s treading the pavements. Lit by the lamps of a stream of black cabs, watched by an audience lurching by, eyes peeled through crowded bus windows.

The catwalk: our slabbed side-walk, of course. And our models: they come to see and be seen, to support, to shine, to be part of a multi-billion dollar global in-dustry, to parade, to work. To be photographed, to photograph. Toblog, cajole, meet, mingle. To in-form, learn and absorb. Today, in this city, everyone is a model.

Like Baudrillard’s Paris, girls totter through the arcades of Somerset House whilst men in dark glass sip from takeaway coffee cups and watch.

of the fashionscape.It’s the underbelly of high art, the economic viability of a stylish idea. Uniqueness democratised.

And like a buoyant dinghy, it’s a vein of cre-ativity that refuses to be dragged d o w n or over-i n f l a t e d . True, street f a s h i o n w o u l d n ’ t

-out the sea of publicity

and rambling modern-day docu-menters that London Fashion Week proper brings. But without the Sartorialists, Stockholms, Is-abellas and Daphnes, the mind-blowing design and world-class style we see on private catwalks would seem as hollow as a set prop.

Like the Thames that once

House’s arches, London fashion has energy – it surges, ebbs and swells. Its protagonists will visit and will leave. Styles will come and go and designers will burn bright and fade. But London’s paths, pedestals and palaces of infectious creativity will remain.

“...Without the Sartorialists, Stockholms,

Isabellas and Daphnes, the mind-blowing design and world-class style we see on

private catwalks would seem as hollow as a set prop”

Here, David Yeo’s reportage from the sidelines of Somerset House’s frenetic hubbub cap-ture fashion spilling into London life – and London life crossing into the London Fashion Week bubble. It’s not a normal snap-shot of London fashion, but a hyper-condensed, concentrated, creative burst – and its glow will

onto some of the world’s best-known catwalks. The lense is turned away from mass-produced runway models and instead onto their watchers so that gradual-ly, the audience is becoming as much a part of the circus-esque spectacle as the designer dressesthemselves. Taken on the hoof – as naturally as possible, usually in a rush and at the behest of the elements - Yeo’s photographs of photographers, models, movers and mysterious looks expose the rapturous buoyancy of the city’s style.