Richard Quinn Fall 2021 Ready To Wear

Introducing Cecil B. DeQuinn, the London designer who has made his epic, floral-fetish reentry to fashion via a silver screen extravaganza. Latex gimp-suited cats and dogs, ballerinas and ballgowns, a story that spiralled from a red-light, nightlife London Soho-on-steroids scene through manic Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella-ish twists and turns—it had it all.

“It’s how I imagine a Richard Quinn world, and all the people in it,” he said. “It’s bigger, a lot bigger, than anything we’ve done before. I wanted to take the time to embrace film. It’s like all my sketchbooks I’ve been doing since I was at art school. And it’s an ode to Hollywood Technicolor, which I love.”

If anyone thought that Quinn had gone very quiet during the pandemic—he skipped two digital London fashion seasons—he’s proved them very wrong. True, he was known to be making scrubs for NHS doctors out of his unused florals during Britain’s PPE emergency, and had pivoted to selling flowery pajamas to cheer up those endless lockdown days of working from bed. But it turns out that while mostly everyone else was binge-watching Netflix, Richard Quinn, somewhere under a railway arch in Peckham, was busy binge-designing, binge-embroidering, binge-printing, and binge-fantasizing his own movie into existence.

“Well, it was a real labor of love,” he said. “And it’s something which goes against the grain. I wanted to do something that was really creative, that was not a catwalk show, the usual. Even the really big houses are doing ‘up and down’ the catwalk again. And I thought it was nice to be able to use a dance company [the Dane Bates Collective], to have a creative outlet for them, because theaters have been shut so long.”

All it took was a hundred people on a movie set—sets which were entirely printed by Quinn, including a blue-and-white flower-printed grand piano and three London black cabs printed with psychedelic ’70s daisies. The Lilies Cole and McMenamy and U.K. Drag Race’s favorite star Bimini Bon-Boulash made cameo appearances. “Because I wanted it to be a showcase of what we can do in London, even in a pandemic,” he said.

The clothes? Well, the clothes appeared to be costumes, really, all the recognizable, blown-up Richard Quinn vintage haute couture pastiche shapes “with everything crafted to within an inch of its life,” as he put it. There were embroideries laden with pearls, bugle beads, sequins, and gemstones. A mini bride’s dress and matching groom’s bell-bottomed suit were sewn with gold crucifixes, padded love hearts, and tiny turtledoves. And on top of all that, he showed acres of printed pouf dresses, a whole wedding-turned-disco party packed with guys dancing in flowery suits among ball-gowned women.

Quinn reports that every time he goes to the extreme, “there’s always a lot of women who are drawn to the ‘shebang’ dress. And,” he chuckles, “I’m also drawn to the shebang.” There are private collectors for the heavily embroidered pieces. Since he showed a wedding vignette as the denouement to his fall 2019 show, he says, “we’ve been getting people sending pictures of it, saying they want something like that, at least twice a month, ever since. So that semi-couture business has grown a lot for us.”

Beneath all this, there are also more practical cheery-uppy things that humans can wear this fall: vibrantly printed denim jackets and jeans, and a whole series of ‘après-ski’ own-label Richard Quinn puffers which follow the proven success of his collaboration with Moncler.

But the other point of pulling off this extravaganza of excess is that Quinn is thinking of how he can extend his brand to become a lifestyle proposition. “With all the sets, it’s subliminally implanting the idea that we can be more than just the clothes,” he says. “That we could be homewear, extravagant wallpapers, perfume. It’s showing that if we want to print a grand piano or a taxi, or anything you want, we can.” In the next few weeks, Quinn is launching his direct-to-consumer e-commerce site. “So maybe, if people order in London, we’ll drive it round to your house in a Richard Quinn cab. And one day I want to have a florist service.” Well, full marks for Quinn’s optimism and can-do-ism. At a time when most designers are erring on the side of caution, he’s dreaming larger than ever.