10 MAGAZINE: KIKO KOSTADINOV SS22

By Paul Toner

A sunkissed prelude to London Fashion Week, which officially kicks off tomorrow, Tuesday night’s Kiko Kostadinov womenswear show was a love letter to summers been and gone. Held in an intimate salon setting just off Brick Lane, shadowed by East London skyscrapers, designers Laura and Deanna Fanning had their sights set on their native Australia. “The collection was a bit like a trip down memory lane,” explained the pair, who haven’t been able to return home since the pandemic began.

Feeling nostalgic, the sisters began thinking back to their adolescence, in particular, their beach getaways as kids, where over 30 of their friends and cousins would pile into a small beach house. “You’d go camping and share each other’s clothes,” said Deanna, “maybe putting on your best friend’s cardigan that’s a little too small for you. Or your dad’s linen shirt, a fabric that you wouldn’t normally wear.”

Thinking of salty skin, aloe vera-ed tan lines and toes coated in sand, the pair’s retrofuturistic womenswear – synonymous with geometric shapes and spiral pattern cutting – felt loose and free. Sunset hues glazed space-dyed ribbed cardigans, which came asymmetric, turned upside down and held in rippled formations like a crisp towel on damp skin – worn over satin slip dresses with knitted cut-outs that looked coral-like. Elsewhere, figure-hugging “bootleg” jeans and chiffon twinsets printed with Australian daisies felt made for places like Barcelona, where you can emerge from the beach and head straight into the bustling inner-city.

Models walked wearing seashell necklaces – like you and your siblings would make on long August days – and carried new iterations of the brand’s Trivia bag, as well as a new accessory: the Twisted Spiral Shopper, a glossy, lemon-yellow number that elevates the everyday tote. Stepping back out into a somewhat chilly East London, it felt like we’d just returned from a beach getaway of our own. In the words of All Saints, take me to the beach.

i-D: KIKO KOSTADINOV AW21

Kiko Kostadinov AW21 is a wardrobe to be seen on the streets in

Laura and Deanna Fanning served up 29 looks of government-sanctioned-daily-walk chic. 

By Mahoro Seward

Long before it became a pandemic trend, Laura and Deanna Fanning were staunch advocates of the meandering urban stroll. In an ironic twist of fate, though, while the rest of us have been discovering the vigour-giving benefits of a good, long walk over the past year, the twin sisters at the helm of Kiko Kostadinov womenswear have hardly had any time for one themselves. “It’s something we’ve really missed!” Deanna sighs, “To be honest, we're kind of workaholics, so the past six months, or year even, hasn't really offered us too many opportunities to get out of our working environment. We really miss watching people and seeing things that keep you going and inspire you and remind you why you're doing fashion.” “And also why you live in a big city!” Laura adds.

In many respects, they echo the spirit of the flâneur -- that brooding archetype of early modernity, immortalised by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, who sauntered Paris’ arcades and boulevards, tapping into the creative energy that pulsed through the living city’s heart. It’s an ethos and energy that they placed at the heart of their AW21 collection, a body of work that both celebrates, and anticipates the return of, the noble art of flânerie… albeit with a twist.

“Flâneur is a word in the French dictionary but flâneuse” -- its grammatical feminine counterpart -- "is not. It's a concept that's never been afforded to women,” notes Deanna. “We wanted to look at it from a purely female perspective,” she continues, to reimagine and create a wardrobe for the contemporary flâneuse.

Naturally, there’s a focus on comfort and movement. Square necked tops, dresses and an abbreviated jumpsuit are fashioned in bright, micro-cable knit stripes, engineered to allow for uninhibited stretch. And swathes of radiating polka-dot satin are sensuously draped to create trailing skirts that hitch up into halter neck dresses, sashes that snake through belt loops on the jigsaw panelled boiler suits, and collared dresses with flamboyant, flared sleeves.

These ocular patterns reference prints worn by the stylish subjects snapped in STREET magazine, the Japanese chronicle of the ‘80s and ‘90s street fashion scenes in major cities across the world. “We specifically looked at images from London and Paris,” Laura says, “because they’re the places we were missing the most.” These images of attendees lingering outside fashion show venues and people simply passing by then became the fuel for some of the collection’s bolder silhouettes. The waisted wool felt coats with warped pocket flaps, for example, hark back to “an image of a woman wearing a military jacket walking down the street; she really looks like she's claiming the space, strutting to somewhere she needs to be,” says Laura. That sense of uncompromising presence is also conveyed through cropped jackets and evening coats collaged from wool and eco-faux fur -- a fabric the sisters first began working with in AW20 -- while duchess satin trousers with skirt overlays inserted into darts running down the leg swish and rustle when walked in. “It's a sound that's quite glamorous is a way,” Laura says, “it's so particular and you're instantly drawn to looking at a person. It really makes you notice someone walking through a space.”

Indeed, these are clothes that create statements, though not blaring ‘look-at-me!’ kind. Rather, they ooze a quietly assured, off-kilter poise; an impeccable, magnetic weirdness. The most concrete token of that is, without doubt, the first-ever Kiko Kostadinov handbag, a warped baguette in a sturdy polished leather. Modelled on cultish mini-bags from the nineties and early aughts, the sisters developed it with the intention of creating something with the same collector’s item appeal, albeit with a slightly tougher edge. “With the small bags we love from that era, you have to be really precious with them,” Deanna says, “we often find ourselves wishing that they were a bit more industrial.” Indeed, preciousness is one thing you won’t find much of here. For all this season’s aesthetic panache, it’s a collection made to be worn. Come September, when our cities’ streets throng with life once again, these will be the clothes to walk, and to be seen walking, in.