4 min readWhen I was starting out in fashion about a decade and a half ago – a time when street style and e-commerce were in their infancy, editors were warring with bloggers, and people still took notebooks to fashion shows – there was one designer whose show was the hottest, hardest-to-get ticket at London Fashion Week: Christopher Kane. He, along with his sister and muse Tammy Kane, became the definitive designers of my generation. Glasgow-born, Central Saint Martins-trained, Donatella Versace-approved, it was Christopher Kane who was the leader of a pack of designers who were reviving London’s reputation as the epicenter of all things cool, subversive and creative — so much so that Burberry returned to London Fashion Week in 2009, and designers such as Tom Ford, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen all followed suit. Cool Britannia, the sequel!
So, when Kane shuttered his label in 2023, cries could be heard from women around the world who anticipated his collections with the fervor of football fans. It felt like British fashion had lost one of its last true originals: a designer with a fully formed visual language, one that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. In an era where so much fashion has become flattened by algorithms, market research, and the endless pressure to be commercially legible, Kane’s work remained thrillingly specific. You could recognize it instantly. Each collection had a distinctive look, a pulse.
Christopher Kane
Last week, the same cries – this time of joy! – could be heard last week when it was announced that Christopher and Tammy would be taking the helm of Mulberry, one of the great made-in-Britain heritage brands, which for years has felt as though it has been waiting for someone to give it back its point of view. He will be staging his debut show at London Fashion Week in September, ready-to-wear and all.
For those of us who live in London and still love this city, his arrival at Mulberry could mean far more than a successful turnaround. It could signal a renewed confidence in British fashion itself. At a moment when so many young British designers are struggling to survive or have left for Paris, and so much of the industry feels dominated by conglomerates and caution, Kane’s return feels symbolic. It is a reminder that British fashion still has room for wit, perversity, intelligence, and risk.
Fall 2015
You see, there are designers who create beautiful clothes, and then there are designers who alter the vocabulary of beauty altogether. Christopher Kane has always understood that glamour is most interesting when it is a little wrong. His work never simply asked whether something was pretty; it asked why we thought certain things were ugly in the first place. He took the vulgar, the synthetic, the pornographic, the fluorescent, the strange, and he held it up to the light until it became sublime.
Long before Crocs were on the runway, it was Kane who made them fur-lined and crystal-studded. Or his handbags, for instance, which had seatbelt-inspired straps. I’ll never forget his Fall 2019 show, where I sat behind former first lady Samantha Cameron, as we all watched a show of sleek black dresses, trying to figure out what they were fastened by. Were those … pockets of jelly, like the liquid-filled pencil cases of our youth? Well, yes. Like childhood alien toys and lava lamps, the acid-coloured gel pochettes were totally out of the ordinary and snapped up at Browns on South Molton Street (RIP) later that year.
Spring 2023
Nobody else could make gorillas, roadkill, surgical seams, or acid neon feel tender. Christopher Kane’s genius lay in his refusal to obey the old hierarchies of taste. He treated lace and plastic with the same reverence. He understood that a woman could want to feel glamorous and dangerous, polished and peculiar, hyper-feminine and faintly monstrous, all at once.
In fact, he once told me about meeting Miuccia Prada for the first time, and her telling him that his were the only collections she looked at during fashion week. It makes sense when you think about it – they are both designers who understand that intelligent beauty doesn’t lie in perfection, but in friction. The friction between sex and innocence. Between luxury and vulgarity. Between humor and seriousness. Between what fashion had taught us to desire and what fashion had taught us to dismiss.
British fashion, at its best, has always been about contradiction. Vivienne Westwood turned rebellion into romance. Alexander McQueen transformed violence into extreme elegance. Christopher Kane made bad taste feel transcendent. He took the visual language of tabloids, high streets, council estates, sex shops, suburban interiors, biology textbooks, fetish wear, and teenage girlhood, and elevated it into something not only luxurious but emotionally intelligent.
It seems strange writing this now, because so many designers have been inspired by Kane’s work, and you can see his influence on so many collections in various fashion capitals. But there was always something deeply personal about his work. For all its perversity, it never felt cynical. Kane understood the complexity of women: the desire to be looked at, the desire to disappear, the desire to shock, the desire to be protected, the desire to feel beautiful in ways that are difficult to explain.
Which is why his appointment at Mulberry feels so exciting. Mulberry under Christopher Kane could become something rare: a heritage house with a sense of humor, a luxury brand with a point of view, a British institution that feels alive rather than embalmed. Kane’s greatest gift has always been his ability to make the strange feel desirable. And British fashion needs that strangeness now more than ever.