This carefully edited collection may not have had the same wow factor as Reed's previous shows, but that didn't matter. Reed is as talented in design as he is in entertaining.
For fall, British-American designer and creative director of Nina Ricci swapped the hollow industrial hallways of the Tate Modern for its older, more traditional sibling, the Tate Britain.
“This season I really wanted to focus on the clothes; “I’ve always loved the idea of old and new,” Reed said of his seventh collection.
She was inspired by Victorian paper dolls and turned botanical wallpaper into fabric. “I tried to find an interesting angle with sustainability by sponging the wallpaper for months and then literally repurposing it into corsetry and over-the-top jackets,” Reed said.
Other looks included an off-the-shoulder minidress in teal and gold vines; a dress with a large embroidered peony design made up of a million stitches in a single panel, and an exaggerated neckline that acts as a halo.
A string quartet serenaded the audience, with a deadly, dramatic staccato straight out of a Victorian Gothic novel.
The wallpaper came from Fromental, a design studio in north London that specializes in wall coverings and was co-founded by Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes.
“These are all pieces from the last 20 years of our business, our favorite archive and experimental pieces. Meeting with Harris, we went through and opened that file and turned it into this tonight, [which] “It’s really quite exceptional,” Butcher said.
“Once a paper has been used or if it has just been displayed, it remains in a warehouse studio for years and is never used again; these are pieces that have been embroidered with the finest silks for hundreds of hours,” Deshayes added. .
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