The designer is known for her endlessly inventive ways with fabrics — especially denim — and in particular the pieces she created from recycled jeans. This season, Steinmetz said she wanted to explore denim “as a medium, rather than just a piece of clothing.”
Her arresting presentation saw models lying in the white recessed niches of walls set up in the Topshop show space in Old Spitalfields Market, their faces painted silvery blue, as if they were otherworldly creatures. They wore intricately crafted denim pieces, inspired, Steinmetz said, by “the effect of light on a pair of jeans.”
The designs ranged from the wearable to one-off, artier pieces. In the former camp was a shirtdress in ombré shades of white and blue denim, embroidered with Steinmetz’s name repeated as a logo. And in the latter was a pair of jeans dusted with thousands of tiny blue Swarovski crystals that looked like particles of dust, with shards of clear crystal at the waistband.
“We want to have fun with the brand,” said Steinmetz of this dual-pronged approach. “We really want to create little denim pieces of art, and then have pieces that are seasonal.” The designer’s focused, capsule approach to showing her wizardry with fabric provided an intriguing glimpse into both the commercial — and artistic — possibilities of her work.