Galliano. McQueen. Chalayan. McCartney. These London Libertines “Created Their Own Rules”

It was London, not Paris or New York that set the 1960's swinging. The city became a mecca for youth. Mary Quant dressed them in miniskirts, the Beatles made them dance. The party was epic, but so was the recovery. With the exception of punk, it wasn’t until the late 1980's and 1990's that the capital was shaken awake again by a new generation of iconoclasts. As In Vogue host Hamish Bowles summarizes: “The young London designers of the 1990s broke the rules because they wanted clothes to be a part of the world we live in, and they wanted their designs to interrogate our world as well.”

Soho was the stomping ground of these London Libertines. By day they could be found at Central Saint Martins; at night they dressed to outdo each other at clubs. Unlike established designers who were then catering to the royal set that revolved around a very proper Princess Diana, this merry band wanted to upend tradition. “We were there to challenge social and sexual mainstreams, you know, we were not only doing fashion,” says Hussein Chalayan. A driving force in their work, observes the Costume Institute’s Andrew Bolton, was “that clash between tradition and transgression, the past and the present that defines English culture.”

Chalayan, who hails from Cyprus, was engaged in the political aspects of identity as expressed through dress, as evidenced by his repeated examination of the chador. He also works across media, engaging with technology, architecture, and even furniture design. Among the designers discussed in this podcast, he is the most minimal, and remains self-funded.

The careers of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, who graduated from Saint Martins in 1984 and 1992 respectively, crisscrossed for years. Though their aesthetics were dramatically different each was a fantasist in his own way. McQueen, who died in 2010, used his shows to spin sci-fi horror stories or to evoke the eerie drama of Alfred Hitchcock. Galliano preferred historical romances. “I was drinking it, living and breathing it, says the designer. “And, I don’t know, I guess I was starting to get lost more in the history and illustrations and cartoons, and the way they depicted these characters and often summed up a line.”

Such was the energy in London, that it became a talent pool for newly formed luxury conglomerates with legacy brands that needed some new life. It caused a stir when John Galliano became the first Englishman to head the very Parisian house of Givenchy. When he moved to Christian Dior, McQueen took his place there. In 1997 McCartney, not yet two years out of Saint Martins, was tapped to remake Chloé. It was a job she accepted only after the house agreed that the designer, a pioneer of sustainability, did not need to use leather.

McCartney brought a female gaze to Chloé and a focus on clothes that were destined for a woman’s wardrobe, rather than a museum exhibition, say. “I wasn’t trying to editorialize my work,” she says. “I just wanted to design clothes that I could wear and that all my girlfriends could wear—and they did. And that became quite powerful.”

Galliano, McQueen, Chalayan, McCartney, each of these designers in their own way, helped shift fashion in new directions. “I think London designers always feel empowered to follow their sense of the world as much as their sense of fashion,” says Vogue’s Mark Holgate. “There’s a belief that fashion isn’t just really about pretty frocks and pretty clothes.” Instead, fashion was a vehicle to explore concepts and self-expression. Bowles observes that these designers saw fashion as a means “to create your own rules for living in the world”—no matter where the customer was in relation to England’s “scepter’d isle.”