Gui Rosa SS27
Hi, Society
Writer: Lily Egleton
Gui Rosa’s London Fashion Week debut arrived with a very clear sense of what it wants to be, alongside some playful and camp Gossip Girl references. If you are somebody who has binge-watched Gossip Girl as incessantly as I have, you will understand how instantly I understood the reference to the Angus and Jenny debacle in which a character named Angus burned all of fashion student, Jenny's, clothing. As a fellow (former) fashion student myself, this is a episode I, too, have pondered upon a lot. Hi, Society was a camp, messy and deliberately excessive portrayal of this same reference - a kind of fashion-world debutante ball where the guests have been left unsupervised. Staged in the ballroom of the Taj Hotel, the presentation drew on Gossip Girl, old-fashioned glamour and the intimacy of the boudoir, with models circulating rather than simply walking the runway. There were wigs, neon shoes, slinky camisoles and pencil skirts galore. Without even knowing the plot of that specific episode, it is a seamless and comprehensive collection.
There is something appealing about the fact that Rosa does not seem particularly interested in making clothes that behave themselves or necessarily conventionally pretty or neat. Her work has always been driven by an unusual tension between the familiar and the strange - a messy, yet enthralling, combo. A cashmere cardigan might be cut apart and reassembled with leather and brass; delicate knitwear sits alongside hardware and lace; crochet is pushed away from its associations with domestic craft and towards something more provocative. Rosa describes this process as a way of bringing together softness and bondage, the mundane and the remarkable.
The problem, for me, is that the collection sometimes mistakes the presence of these contradictions for the resolution of them. The individual ingredients are interesting, but they do not always add up to something equally compelling. There is crochet, leather, chiffon, brass, wigs, exposed skin and a deliberately trashy glamour - a theme I absolutely adored being referenced during a Fashion Week where you encounter one sophisticated and gorgeous ensemble after another - yet the accumulation can begin to feel more like a catalogue of references than a fully developed visual argument.
Rosa clearly has a strong visual personality, and Hi, Society feels like the work of someone who would rather risk being too much than disappear into the background. That is a useful instinct, particularly at a London Fashion Week where emerging designers are increasingly expected to establish both a recognisable identity and a commercially viable language. The collection contains traces of her earlier work, particularly her fascination with transforming traditionally soft or wholesome materials into something stranger and more sexually charged. Overall, the collection felt cohesive without losing its subversive quality. Beneath the camp and the deliberate debauchery is a designer with a real interest in construction, texture and the transformation of ordinary garments.
Hi, Society was loud, playful and occasionally fascinating, but it is also a reminder that having a lot to say is not quite the same as knowing which parts are worth saying. For a first London Fashion Week appearance, though, there is something encouraging in that excess. Rosa has certainly made herself difficult to ignore. The more interesting question is what she will choose to keep once the elements of debauchery are less visible within her themes and concepts, but also I long to witness how she will mix in further pop culture references as ingredients within future collections.
