Page 23 - Finnies_Timeless 6

FINNIES THE JEWELLER
TIMELESS
“Oh, in Scotland it’s so rammed down your throat at school that we didn’t want to look at it for years,” Kane laughed, when he started to show me the collection in a preview at his shop in Mount Street in London. “But when Tammy and I started to research it, we realised that Charles and his wife Margaret were not widely accepted at the time in this country – they were celebrated in Paris, but not here. Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh’s designs for textiles and embroidery were incredible too. But they were outsiders at the time, and me and Tammy relate to that.”
Kane secured permission to shoot the collection at Hill House, and the results are probably the prettiest he's ever produced. There’s a long white lace dress embroidered with snake’s-head fritillaries. Dresses constructed from black latticework or bold black-and-white verticals echo Mackintosh furniture shapes. It’s subtle, though, and it all remeshes back into the design language Kane has been building over the past 11 years. The grid pattern, for instance, clearly made him revisit his own love of gingham. There’s a faded pink chiffon tiered dress, trimmed in marabou, which is 100 per cent recognisable as part of Christopher Kane’s subtle, continuous storytelling about his upbringing.
When he explains it, backstage at a show, journalists often stagger back in surprise, not sure if they’ve quite heard right. The gingham, for instance: “It makes us think of our mum going out slaving to clean in schools so we could have things, in her gingham overall,” he says. “And that's why we put cleaner- sponges in the shoes.” The Kanes’ mother, Christine, died suddenly in 2015,
SHARED IDENTITY:
above, Nicholas Daley, half Scottish, half Jamaican, is one of the most exciting newcomers in men’s fashion week;
left, Nicholas Daley’s A/W17 collection shows how he makes connections through plaid, yarn and the two-way influence inherent in the tribal uses of checked pattern across continents to India and Africa
21