Christopher Raeburn. Spring/Summer 2021 - London Fashion Week.

Images from Christopher Raeburn.  All rights. Used in promotion of the designer.)

London Fashion Week for Spring/Summer 2021 had a very brief and focused digital moment of three days finishing on Sunday the 14th June, courtesy of the British Fashion Council newly created online digital showcase.  In the ominous shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic and the possibility that the virus will reemerge as a continuum until a vaccine is found.  Most trade based industries that rely on face to face buyers have all but been decimated as a concept, more so this has been seen in the fashion world which will take a significant hit. Doing away with the traditional runway shows and fashion weeks and their festival presentations have all but become a recent memory.  

When viewed with nostalgia at the tail end of 2019 pre viral outbreak, designers were persistently marketing slow fashion as a catch cry towards a wasteful industry, in an attempt at counter balancing the massive consumption base that was Asia and China.  Which as a consumer of choice, fashion brands have been emerging over the last 5 years at an exponential rate.  Casting an impression of diversifying markets against the billion dollar fashion industry, whilst trying to slow fashion down.  That despite the sincere idealism, it would, on paper, appear to be unworkable as a profitable reality.   But, this has all changed, as the pandemic which is still currently sweeping the world, shutting down boarders, manufacturing bases and crimping the global economy along the way; has stopped hyper consumption in its tracks.  However that being said, not even the smaller brands may come out of this unscathed, as overall we are still in early days of the contagion, which has descended upon all of us.  It continues to be an unsettling time – all the while, in its waves of turmoil, there have been frantic adjustments to keep it all afloat. 

The UK designer Christopher Raeburn is one of the more renown of fashion designers who has utilized the mountains of unused and discarded clothing and fabrics, mostly sourcing Essential Services off cuts and Military surplus for his collections, he has, over the course of the many fashion weeks that have past, offered a solid and well presented array.  As noted with my reviews of the very few seasonal fashion lookbook's to date, there has been a stripped back and sparse offering on show.  Designers, by a force of hand, have reduced their collections substantially, offering a more defined and thought out show case than previous Fashion Weeks.  Due to the austereness of quarantines and lockdowns, it has been indicative of what materials were available for designers in creating their latest designs and by its nature,  represents the epitome of slow fashion.  

Raeburn has further added to this opportunity to instill his stalwart practice of recycling, by declaring in an open question for his 2021 lookbook: “What could be more radical than making nothing at all”, with a new business model called “RAEFOUND” Raeburn has picked through the massive stockpiles of NATO military clothing, reformatting and asserting the styles as a non seasonal collection under the RAEFOUND banner.  Debuting via the British Fashion Industry online platform, Raeburn has offered a creative glimpse of pieces that reflect a changing world.