Sharon Wauchob. Spring 2021 RTW - London

                      (Images:  Sharon Wauchob.  All credit.)

Sharon Wauchob is an interesting designer, who over the years I've noticed her collections move away from the Versace-esque influences to a more defined style, seen from her Fall 2015 styles onward. Embracing the more minimalistic of looks, she has be able to create her thereafter collections with an instilled uniqueness. A 1990s Central Saint Martins graduate, she also holds the distinction of starting out as a junior cutter at the famous Savile Road in London, so with the world enveloped in its pandemic turmoil, it seems fitting that after spending many years in Paris, she has returned to London, back to her roots.

For London's digital fashion week, Wauchob has presented Spring 2021 collection in its lookbook format, revealing her take on the reformatted glamor, to which Wauchob has mastered over the course of her career.  She has drawn from her own backlog as an inspiration, which is, in itself a divine guidance that only a masterful creative can achieve – and I have always admired this trait of a designer, when he or she begins to draw influence from themselves.  It is Wauchob's cuts and fits, which are some of the most precision I've seen in the industry, as is her eye for details.  Her latest collection, although devised by Wauchob as a retrospection, even though it is viewed through the lookbook, which can, at times, restrict the details of a collection.  Yet, Wauchob and her creative team have risen to the occasion with a superb editorial styled lookbook, revealing her latest Ready-to-Wear in its finery degree.  

2020 will be and possibly throughout 2021, a mix of off and on lockdowns and quarantines.  Fumbled poorly by the leaders of the world, after the first global lock downs occurred at the start of the year.  It was this mad rush to reopen the Northern Hemisphere for Spring/Summer that has set back all the work in suppressing the virus for another year The gamble that the lawmakers made, in assumption that the virus had dissipated with out vaccinations, was a terrible mistake.  Not to mention the wayward politics in between. The human race is facing a hard lesson, which it refuses to learn.  So the beat down will continue, without a conscious care.  Such is nature. Wauchob, like many other creative in enduring the pandemic, have taken the opportunity to set a precedence, but as a master designer that she is, it is done as mentioned, in retrospection and practice. 

Stunningly layered and constructed pieces at 26 in total, Wauchob Spring 2021 collection is set within silk, satin and tulle, delicate, while also slightly rugged in its appeal as RTW styles.  Upon viewing other 2021 designer lookbooks, it seems that the avant-garde trend is returning, albeit muted and indicative of the uncertain environments that we all face.  Society as we know is changing, to what it will culturally evolve into, is the great unknown.  The asymmetrical stylization and off-cut shapes that Wauchob has experimenting with, as a past trend, maybe more aligned with the reduction of materials.  

A beatifically created collection, entailing what could be the cusp of Fashion redefining itself, not as some backlash medium, but something more definitive, to be born anew.