‘Walk backwards through a hedge, wear your slippers as earrings, extract your wisdom teeth, paint your left knee green, and pretend your name is Keith’, encouraged Ashley Williams’ AW20 notes, as the designer presented a brilliantly chaotic collection on the first day of London Fashion Week.
Citing stars of the silver screen in the form of Jessica Rabbit, Hairspray’s Dawn Davenport, Thelma and Louise, Rose DeWitt Bukater, Poison Ivy, and Alabama Worley (to name but a few) as her inspiration for the new season, the offering served up a series of Williams’ favourite things.
Tacky, tourist-y tees with beaded fringing were emblazoned with crude, spray-painted rottweilers, 80s-esque portraits, and the Mona Lisa, as paired with acid-washed denim mom jeans, ra-ra skirts and puff-shouldered dresses, while boxy little 90s-inspired suits trimmed with glittering diamantes were finished with pointy stilettos and sheer black tights, as well as some cute furry slippers we’d love to get our hands on (or more appropriately, our feet in).
Elsewhere slogans including ‘In Dog Years I’m Dead’ and ‘Life is Pain’ were splashed across tight tops and skinny pencil skirts (because #mood), swingy coats were covered in cute dog prints, and a patched-together dress, created in collaboration with friend Claire Barrow, was crafted using scraps of surplus fabric and deadstock from Williams’ archive: “We dismantled our past and put it back together in a beautifully wrong way,” explained the designer.
Rounding things off with a short, sharp hit of 00s nostalgia, Williams debuted Samsung’s latest flip-phone, the uber-futuristic Galaxy Z, on the runway as part of a collab which saw her create a perfectly proportioned micro bag intended to hold the tiny handset. “The flip-phone holds so much nostalgia for me and in my eyes is the ultimate coming of age accessory and this collection was all about designing for my inner 2000s teenager,” she explained post-show. Come AW20, if anyone needs to make a call: Ashley Williams has got a phone.
