Founded by Roger Saul in 1971 in Somerset as a leather goods company, Mulberry still has its roots in the county, where it has two bag and leather goods factories. The name resonates fondly as a British entity, with more recent overlays of the cute, fun, girly shows laid on in noughties fashion weeks by former creative directors Stuart Vevers, Emma Hill, and Jonny Coca.
Predictions of what Kane might do with anything are never that wise. Unpredictability—the surprise element he’s always delivered with every collection—has ever been part of the thrill of Kane’s creativity. But let’s have a go. For starters, he is an ace dress designer, perpetually walking the line between eroticism and chic. If there is a need for colorful, quirky, optimistic party dresses for young women to go dancing in, in these dark days, then Kane’s the man. After all, it was his neon-bright bandage and frou-frou first collection that dared hit that mark in 2006, when so much else was black and beige and timidly boring.
His references are guaranteed to be wild—The Planet of the Apes, Princess Margaret “on acid,” Cynthia Payne’s notorious brothel, school biology textbooks, religious cults, Frankenstein, and Masters and Johnston’s The Joy of Sex books have all been in the mix in the past. The way it turns out is always developed with incredible techniques, invented by the Kanes, and yet always, somehow, wearable.
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