Sharp and structured, soft and fluid, shiny and matte. For her first coed outing, Sharon Wauchob took to the dark and incense-filled All Saints Church in Fitzrovia for a collection that was full of opposing forces — and it worked.
The show began on a puritanical, elegant note: The first model, a woman, wore a lean black jacket with puffs of white shirt cuffs emerging from the extralong sleeves. A male model followed, wearing a similar tailored style along with a white shirt that had an elongated, pointy collar.
Both jackets were done in collaboration with Norton & Sons on Savile Row, and set the tone for this small, focused collection.
Wauchob dressed her men in loose, lightweight, sweeping layers — long untucked shirts under suits, transparent tops like sweeps of gray-blue cloud and roomy trousers that pooled around the feet. Trenches and shirts were gently crinkled and some had a plastic-y shine while one printed coat was as languid as a bathrobe.
The designer took a similar approach to the women’s collection, pairing a diaphanous green skirt — fit for a sprite — with an elongated, structured jacket, and sent another model out in a long, ghostlike gauzy white dress, which made quite an impact floating down the church aisle. Printed, tiered dresses were just as fluid and floaty.
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The show was terrific and while Wauchob could have benefited from sending a few more looks down the aisle maybe, given the venue and the frankincense hanging in the air, she wanted her message to be more about purity — and restraint — in a noisy, crowded industry.