Show Report
It's all too easy to get wrong, but this season they walked the line with ease.
With Giles, the joy is often in the imperfection - a print not quite right, a fabric too heavy or too soft, or the whole thing endearingly skew-whiff. This isn't by chance, mind you: Deacon has a sure eye for detail, and if something is wayward it is intentionally so. This was certainly the feeling of his most recent show, taking as inspiration for his postmodern couture the Modernist couture of the sixties, namely Cardin, Courreges and that odd chase to dress the space race. Giles certainly had the colours and shapes down pat, with short, A-line frocks and suits in distinctly dated caravan club shades of tan, brown and a peppy fluorescent frosted pink. But rather than restrict himself to the hard, harsh fabrics of the era, Giles added movement to those static shapes by cutting his skirts in fluid crepes that fluttered backwards as the models moved, or with skater-style inverted pleats. He also threw in a touch of shearling, sewn up into massive aviator-meets-Astronaut hooded neckpieces strapped up with buckles. While latching adroitly onto next season's feeling for heft and protection, these chunky wraps were a neat step into Giles' outerspace fantasia, Jules Verne style, that included alien-like fuzzy gremlin bags, asteroid collisions printed across evening frocks and massed cloudlike ruffles resembling asteroid dust, crafted into ditzy corset dresses and easy, drop-waist slips with all the ease of a t-shirt.
For all his experience in Milan, London and now Paris, there's something refreshingly innocent about Giles' work, a straightforward unpretentiousness and sense of fun. It almost looks amateurish, the 'wrongness' of mixing, say, lurex, astrakhan and a jacquard moire in shades of grey shot through with beetle-green and mauve, quilting the results and sticking them on a model with nude lips and a towering backcombed beehive. At the same time, its only through hard work and a deft hand that Deacon and his never-to-be-overlooked right hand woman Katie Grand, can combine those two (or three, or four) wrongs to make a right - something edgy, desirable, and indeed oddly beautiful. It's all too easy to get wrong, but this season they walked the line with ease. Rather than the conventionally pretty it's the tongue-in-cheek chic that makes Giles' clunky-couture so wearable for a new, young generation of women.
