Jenny Packham Spring 2021 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Not only has Jenny Packham spent the summer designing her new collection, but she’s also been putting the finishing touches to a memoir, How To Make A Dress, that will be published by Penguin next year. The book’s title is a simple enough question, but the answer has proven more complicated as lockdown measures have fluctuated unpredictably in London across the summer. Packham’s response to this was to evolve: four times, in fact. Of the collection’s many iterations before she settled on the current lineup, Packham explains: “I just felt the need to keep revisiting it, as I felt the mood had changed.”

Like any designers specializing in occasionwear, Packham has also meditated long and hard on how to reinterpret her codes into something that speaks to the present moment. Yet the limitations imposed by the slow reopening of Packham’s usual factories in Italy and India came with a silver lining: the opportunity to dig deep into her (now over 30 years worth of) archival designs, and to reimagine some of her classic styles anew. The process left her feeling somewhat sentimental. “If I pick up a piece of beading or a dress from the archive, I know who made the pattern and the whole story around it,” says Packham. “When my team and I had to go home for a period of time, I did feel quite lost, actually, and so bringing some of those archival elements into the collection became comforting in a way.”

At the same time, this rare moment of pressing pause brought with it a new perspective. “There were three or four weeks where we were not designing at all, which is rare,” says Packham. “It definitely did happen that, when you started again, there was a freshness to it and a different mood.” Perhaps unexpectedly, the new collection finds Packham in a looser, more playful mode. There are the reliably floaty, summer-ready styles that will prove catnip to her long-established, upper-crust clientele, but also a handful of daring looks that point toward something hedonistic—notably via an embellished caftan in blazing orange that nods to Talitha Getty, and a flared, lavishly sequined jumpsuit that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the dance floor of Studio 54.

“If you look back to the past, when there have been times of hardship, you generally see a swing towards hedonism,” Packham notes. “It’s quite difficult to design something optimistic during this time, but when the parties start again, we’re definitely going to see some amazing fashion.” It might be a little while off yet, but Packham is content to open up her archive to bring smaller doses of late-night decadence to the wardrobes of her loyal customers in the meantime. For the rest of her secrets, though, you’ll have to buy the book.