Welcome to the subterranean world of creative maverick Charles Jeffrey, and to the cult of his fashion label Loverboy. The sparse room chosen to host this occasion is the historic Chats Palace Arts Centre, near the designer’s self-appointed fiefdom of Dalston. It is a venue that, over the past four decades, has played host to punk bands and performance artists alike. It is, therefore, appropriate that he has transported his court of collaborators here to perform their dance macabre.
Jeffrey has staged this new piece of radical performance art as the central narrative to his most commercial venture to date: a short film that will accompany an exclusive capsule collection designed for MatchesFashion.com, as part of its “Innovators” series. The eagerly anticipated drop looks likely to convert many more acolytes to his cause, and further enhance his reputation as one of the most exciting and influential designers of his generation.
Last year was transformative for the post-punk polymath: 27-year-old Jeffery was awarded the British Emerging Talent prize at the 2017 Fashion Awardsfor his radical proposition of contemporary fashion. This year has already seen him storm the menswear runways with a presentation that explored the trauma of growing up in his Scottish hometown as a queer male. That show consolidated his reputation both as an accomplished design technician, and a phenomenal showman. Now, this collection and film - directed by American artist and activist Matt Lambert - once again mines his personal and cultural heritage for powerful ends.
The 18-piece collection comprises signature Loverboy styles reconfigured for a potentially wider-reaching clientele – although some will remain unchanged. Jeffrey’s signature slouched and oversized “drunken” tailoring will as always be the last to leave the party, while the knitwear is expertly shredded, twisted and deconstructed to create schizophrenic shapes which complement agitated pencil skirts and sleazily structured jackets. Jeffrey describes the decision to work with a platform like Matchesfashion.com as “a huge opportunity. We're still kind of indie and rogue in lots of ways but I'm excited about reaching a larger market. We've had such a phenomenal response to our shows and to the theatrics of what we do that it's really important for me to be coming straight out of all of our show narrative into a project that's heavily grounded in product. We do make incredibly nice collections, if I do say so myself... I never want people to get too distracted by the bells and whistles, and forget about the clothes.”
Matchesfashion.com buying director Natalie Kingham continues to praise the confidence and intelligence of the pieces themselves: “Charles is part of a democratic generation who want to challenge convention,” she says. “They demand that everyone looks at fashion differently. But what I love about his shows is that underneath the performance lies fantastically designed clothes. I’m always as excited about the collection when I see it in the studio as when it walks or stomps the catwalk. The performance is not a mask.”
The initial inspiration for the film that accompanies the collection, entitled “Awrite Hen…?”, was a short YouTube clip from the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies video archive. It showed a group of women on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides performing a “waulking” song, a genre of Scottish folk songs traditionally sung in Gaelic by women while fulling (waulking) cloth. This practice involves a group of women rhythmically beating newly woven tweed or tartan against a table or similar surface to soften it. The simple, beat-driven songs were used to accompany the work and were a collective activity that united members of often-isolated communities.
Jeffrey has always been profoundly interested in and inspired by the relationship between Celtic and pagan cultures and his own Scottish heritage and likens these practices to his own process and aesthetic. “There's a lot of looking back where I come from,” he says. “I heard about waulking songs back at university and I guess it's stuck with me. When I was reminded of the tradition more recently it made me think so much about the synergy with which I work with everyone involved in Loverboy. It's like a kind of redemption, or salvation through working hard together. It made me think of my friends.”
Christina Stewart – a historian who specialises in the song traditions of Scotland - was tracked down and persuaded by Jeffrey’s mother to consult on the project and consequently became the performance group’s leader and oracle, adorned for the occasion in blue and red pagan make up to match one of the collections most spectacular pieces, a leather patched Aran sweater. As she explains, “Waulking as a commercial activity died out even in the furthest reaches of the Highlands and islands by about the middle of last century. It was an integral part of producing any woolen fabric, but it’s all done in factories now. A real waulking is time-consuming and hard work, but the singing makes it almost meditative and the singers can get pretty giddy with the work and the breathing while singing. By the end, you can get quite a high off it!”
The designer worked on the film with one of his regular collaborators, theatre director Theo Adams, whose company has performed in the past three seasons of Loverboy shows. Adams brought in his choreographer Masumi Saito and his musical director Jordan Hunt to work with the cast to choreograph the performance and all the singing was done live on set. As he explains, “The challenge was to create something with roots deeply and authentically in the waulking process while transforming it into Charles's Loverboy world. What was crucial to me was to get the most real visceral extreme emotional performances from the cast and capture a genuine sense of catharsis.”
In the commercial fashion arena, visionaries like Jeffrey are a rare breed. As Adams insists, “Charles isn’t afraid to take risks and be theatrical. I think many designers worry that a sense of theatricality in fashion presentation distracts from the clothes, but it's about confidence’”
And Jeffrey oozes confidence, even from beneath the layers of his heavily applied pan stick. He is prepared to go beyond the habitual fashion discourses both in his unflinching exploration of his own sexuality and in the uncompromising presentation of his work and his self. As director Matt Lambert concludes, “The more I get to know Charles, the more I see an auteur whose persona and view of the world permeates everything he makes and does. Fashion just so happened to be the vehicle that could begin to contain the madness…”
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