Michael Halpern is applying for his British residency visa, so it seemed a bit of a hint to the establishment that he’d booked the Old Bailey, one of the highest chambers of justice in the land, for his fall show. Anyway, the marble lobby made an imposing backdrop for a salute to British society fashion as seen through a New Yorker’s eyes. “Now that I’m going to make the UK my permanent home, I thought it was time to pay homage to British society women, and to designers like Ossie Clark, Bill Gibb and Zandra Rhodes—to celebrate the bourgeoisie and the rebel,” said Halpern.
Well, Halpern doesn’t really need to take an excursion into history to justify a trip around ’70s glamour, or thereabouts. He’s been designing with good-time glam in mind ever since he graduated from Central Saint Martins MA with his sequined disco-flare collection in 2016—the same year that produced Richard Quinn; both of them set on defying the gloom times of the Trump election and Brexit referendum from the start.
It was Adwoa Aboah, today’s quintessential London Notting Hill, who led out Halpern’s imaginary salute to the kind of dressing that haute hippies and English aristocrats got up to behind closed doors. He let “color, fun, fantasy, optimism” be his guide, starting with Adwoa’s emerald green burnout velvet gown, flowing out extravagantly from a gold 3-D flower-embroidered collar. There were hugely voluminous bubble gowns which certain duchess dowagers (a class of eccentric lady never unafraid of color) might have worn to country house balls, and one or two caftans which Princess Margaret might perhaps have swished around in on holiday on Mustique.