- By
- Ashley Simpson
- Photography by
- Martin Zähringer
Styling by Amie Robertson. Hair by Yumi Nakada-Dingle at Jed Root. Makeup by Nobuko Maekawa. Model: Jessie Bloemendaal at Select Model Management. Photographer’s assistant: Anna Sophia John.
AV ROBERTSON
When Amie Robertson showed her Fall 2016 collection for her line AV Robertson last February, there was a bit more commotion than at the typical recent graduate début at Fashion East. Backstage, photographers mobbed the scene. Marc Jacobs was in attendance. He had flown in the night before, specifically to see Robertson before launching his makeup line at Harrods. Katie Grand—Jacobs’s stylist and the editor-in-chief of Love—styled the show. And Lineisy Montero, Georgia May Jagger, and Edie Campbell, among others, walked.
But Robertson’s path to that lauded inauguration was not without its struggles. Until moving to London recently, she had been living with her family in Manchester. “It was really, really difficult,” recalls the designer when we Skype earlier in the summer, of the period she spent developing her first collection, “because you don’t really know what you’re doing and there’s no money. I had no money to live in London, so I had to live at my parents’s and turned their dining room into a studio.
“I had no idea that I even had Fashion East,” she continues. “I didn’t know if I was guaranteed anything. It was a take-the-risk kind of thing.”
Robertson, who graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2014, had spent the prior year interning for Jacobs. Before that, she interned at Alexander Wang and Dior. While at Marc Jacobs, she helped design prints and embroideries for Fall 2015, and that focus on detail shows through in her own work. At Marc Jacobs, “I learned so much that I wouldn’t have, that skill just can’t teach you,” she says. “I got to go to the embroidery factories in Paris and Italy and Switzerland and the print factories in Italy. It was so good. It was kind of an everything job. It wasn’t like I was a print designer or an embroidery designer. I was doing a bit of everything.”
Still, Robertson’s specialty now is embroidery. Her Fall 2016 collection is full of color-popping, slinky, three-dimensionally floral-embroidered sweaters and pinstriped pencil skirts. Meticulously constructed floral arrangements grow out of shimmering purple satin shirting and a cherry-red-and-navy, striped, floor-length, slim-cut gown.
For her first outing, Robertson says she looked to American photographer Francesca Woodman, David Bowie, and Mick Jagger for inspiration. She also channeled her dreams. “I’m not really typical, I think, in the way that I design,” she explains. “I know a lot of designers do so much research and a lot of time they are just recreating old stuff in a way. But with me, I’m a bit laughing at the whole thing with the storytelling. I have a really vivid imagination. I never stop designing or thinking of things. I don’t really sleep properly at night because I just have crazy dreams—I kind of design in my dreams almost.”
She says her Fall collection was inspired by a dream where aliens make their way down to earth. Flowers and spurs grow out of them when they hit the land. “That was the basis of my ideas—to have it as if these alien flowers were growing out of the clothes, kind of bursting through the seams,” she reflects. “So it’s a lot of broken seams where the flowers are bursting out of the clothes, and then I also had an unnerving, creepy element to it, like in the film Beetlejuice, with the stripes and had this idea of having stripes veering in different directions. It’s a bit of an illusion to the eyes and a bit unnerving.”
Robertson’s surprisingly intuitive approach to design might be due in part to the circumstances of her upbringing. “I’m completely the black sheep of my family—no one is creative,” she adds. Looking ahead, she says she wants to continue developing modern couture looks, and promises that intricacy will always be a touchpoint for her work. “Embroidery is a bit of an obsession,” says the designer. “It’s so time consuming, but when you obsess and when you see the finished result—it’s just a good feeling.”
- By
- Ashley Simpson
- Photography by
- Martin Zähringer
Styling by Amie Robertson. Hair by Yumi Nakada-Dingle at Jed Root. Makeup by Nobuko Maekawa. Model: Jessie Bloemendaal at Select Model Management. Photographer’s assistant: Anna Sophia John.
