Photography by Sarah Blais.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: KÉJI DENIM'S FALL 2016 PRESENTATION
Last Saturday, during the early days of London Fashion Week, Soho’s Golden Square played host to a very surprising installation. Five girls, dressed in flared trousers and graphic designs in velour, silk, and denim, stood amid drifts of fake powder within a shimmering glass cube, looking for all intents and purposes like the inhabitants of a life-size snow globe. For the assembled editors, it was clear that Kéji Denim was making a powerful statement for its first presentation, but designer Katie Green says that the response that she found most fascinating came from the strangers who unknowingly stumbled onto one of the most creative débuts of the week. “What was really joyful was that there were passersby and people with their kids and everyone was interacting with the globe, walking around it and looking and standing around and chatting,” she says. “I thought it was quite a fresh way to put it out there and treat it like a weird little installation rather than putting a few girls in a room and calling it a presentation. It felt like a good way to do something a little bit different.”
Much of the talk through New York and London so far—thanks to recent decisions by disparate brands like Burberry, Tom Ford, and Diane von Furstenberg about how (and why) to present their collections—has been rather existential, about the purpose and meaning of fashion shows. For Green, it was clear that she saw the presentation, her first after two seasons of distributing look books, as a way to both offer insight into the collection as well as expand upon it. “It basically started with this idea of après-ski and how to do it in a way that wasn’t hashed over so many times,” she says of the inspiration behind her Fall 2016 collection. “That got me thinking of looking back to look forward, so I was looking at these retro images and then giving it a treatment like how people in the Sixties and Seventies would think someone in the future should dress.”
The plastic cube then played on that idea of kitsch and also a sense of retro futurism. “Plastic at that time really embodied the future,” she laughs, “and I thought it was a fun play on that, but using it in a very modern way to encapsulate everything we were trying to say.”
The full Fall collection, with eighteen looks, builds on Kéji’s past two seasons while expanding upon the brand’s core æsthetic. “As ever, a constant thread through all the collections is a sportswear utility element. Every piece is infused with movement,” Green explains. “It’s never turning our back on what’s come, but it’s just widening the offering. For me, it’s always about what is special but believable.”
And, circling back to the square, Green says that her innovative presentation, rather than attempting to display the full collection, was meant to simply reflect the label and its vision. “The main feeling that I try to do with every collection is timelessness, like you don’t actually know what era you’re looking at or what moment,” she says. “I think that to freeze all of that and all of the eclectic influences for the brand was a way to just present a window on the collection in a fresh way.”
Take a closer look at the presentation in our exclusive video below. For more information, please visit KejiDenim.com.
KÉJI DENIM AW16 from Jake Jelicich on Vimeo.
Photography by Sarah Blais.
