Matthew Miller SS15

Initial reaction:

‘Anti war, anti social, anti you’ – this might have been Miller’s manifesto for the season, but the resulting collection was notably poetic, romantic and possibly his strongest to date.

The beauty of despair: 

What happens when there is no enemy left to fight? Exploring the disparate feelings of a soldier post conflict, Miller took utilitarian ‘one size fits all’ garments – in homage to the demob suits given to demobilized troops – and adorned them with memorial floral wreaths. Stark pin striped suits covered in Velcro patch slogans (‘anti’, ‘war’, ‘social’, you’) sat alongside patchwork surface details and crisp denim. The show was styled by Dazed fashion director Robbie Spencer.

References: 

“It all started when I began looking at old war images – I don’t just mean from the 1940s, but I was looking at image from the 1970s and even of Falklands. I wasn’t necessarily just thinking about the utilitarian side, I was thinking about the more despairing side. I bought a lot of demob suits, which were crumbling and just looked at them and how badly they were all made and really thought about them. I did a lot of testing with shredding them and putting them back together and how they would look and all the different textures.” – Matthew Miller.

The soundtrack to Matthew Miller SS15:

Whilst for SS15 the collection has an air of poeticism, last season Miller opted for a tougher skinhead aesthetic, black-clad models looking like a fashionable anarchist reading group. See it below: