London designers want to remind you that humans made these clothes
By Leah Dolan, CNN
London (CNN) — This season, many of the designers showing at London Fashion Week seemed to want to remind us of one thing: humans made these clothes.
It was an idea placed front and center at the Steve O Smith show — which wasn’t a show at all, but a seminar, delivered by Smith himself to 20 or so fashion editors and journalists in a cozy drawing room at the Royal Academy of Arts. Each look was carefully broken down not just in terms of narrative but also granular technique — a luxury compared to the three second fly-by of typical runway shows — from the appliqué sewn on tulle to beading embellishment, panniers and ties cut out of shirts. At the end of the masterclass, Smith gushed effusively of his “incredibly small team” from behind the lecture stand. “It makes me a little bit emotional,” he said. “There’s one seamstress, Joanna, who made everything you’ve seen today. We have one beading artist, Saskia, and Thomas, who is my assistant designer, who is absolutely incredible.”
Backstage at Pauline Dujancourt’s fourth London runway show, the designer — who is part of the prestigious Paul Smith’s Foundation fashion residency program — spoke at length about the 700 hand-crocheted flowers used to adorn one of her ethereal gowns. Each bloom of yarn took between 10 and 15 minutes to make, she said, and many were constructed in Peru by women Dujancourt was able to employ with the money from her Andam Prize win earlier this summer. Her clients in particular love “to know how long it took to make something,” she said.
At Labrum, before guests even saw the clothes on the runway, they got to meet the hands that helped make them. By the doorway to the catwalk two people sat toiling at desks, one hand-beading a piece of cloth and the other machine sewing a denim garment. It was a “performance piece,” they said, though both were actually part of Labrum’s design team. The collection featured hand-woven raffia trousers made in India, as well as shirts, shorts and skirts hand-embroidered with scenes from Sierra Leone. “People don’t understand how things are made and where they’re from,” founder Foday Dumbuya said after the show. “That’s why we wanted to put it at the forefront and celebrate it.”
Currently it’s taken for granted that some person, either with a needle or a sewing machine, made what you are wearing — whether they were paid fairly or worked in safe conditions is less certain. But who knows how much longer that human touch will be guaranteed. AI, which has steadily infiltrated design workflows over the last few years, is now being developed by robotics companies to take on more physical tasks like pattern cutting, sewing and quality inspection in countries like South Korea. When asked whether he thought about AI’s impact on the fashion industry, Dumbuya replied “100%.” “I don’t buy AI,” he continued. “The moment we kill that human interaction, we’re gone.”
Talia Loubaton, founder and designer at Liberowe, went a step further than simply talking about her method. On Sunday afternoon she folded journalists, editors, buyers and even some of her customers right into it by using the presentation to shoot her campaign imagery. The backstage of a runway is usually a hectic underside designers would rather pull a curtain around, but here it was all hanging out. “I think it’s interesting to make it quite immersive,” Loubaton said, as busy stylists and photographers zipped around her, slamming sticky-notes on the giant model board to indicate when they’d photographed a look. She spoke of the importance of “being in the same room and being able to talk through the collection, meet and speak with each other and show you how we work, how we create the imagery and get you in the process.”
This emphasis on the human collateral of fashion week — design teams, photographers, stylists, seamstresses — felt like the real display of luxury. Perhaps it was a deliberate act of technological resistance by designers, or perhaps the old analog ways of working feel new and poignant in our AI-driven world. One thing was for sure: none of these hands were idle.
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