“All of the designers had their own different celebrity followers,” Franks adds. Wendy Dagworthy designed for Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, BodyMap worked with renowned Scottish choreographer and recent JW Anderson collaborator, Michael Clark, and Boy George sauntered down the brand’s catwalk in 1985. “BodyMap had transvestites, grannies and kids in their shows. Katharine Hamnett had African drummers, Tibetan monks, my children and her children… the shows were a lot more entertaining and a lot less serious,” Franks says. “I shouldn’t just keep repeating the word fun, but it was really just enormous fun!”
Since its inception, London Fashion Week has been associated with an eccentricity and grassroots grit that still pervades today. Franks concurs.“The shows then came out of the streets, the clubs, the art colleges,” she says. “We were using live DJs, it was like a party.”
The explosion of toxic tabloid culture in the ’00s ushered in a renewed frenzy for front-row frolics, when the exploits of A-list stars became fodder for the flashing bulbs of the paparazzi. Fashion’s party certainly wasn’t over, and it was probably going to make it onto a front page. Think Sporty Spice screaming with visible glee as she watched Mel B strut down a mirrored runway in a sparkling bubblegum-pink gown at the Julian McDonald show in September 1999, before the ceiling rained with balloons. Or, the front-row formations which became the benchmark of all-British cool at the Topshop Unique and Burberry Prorsum shows, frequented in the mid-Noughties by the likes of Kate Moss, Posh and Becks, Alexa Chung, Agyness Deyn and Emma Watson.
The most famous front rowers of them all? Princess Diana who sat front row at the Joe Casely-Hayford show in 1985 (after attending a Lancaster House launch event for the March 1985 edition of LFW), and Queen Elizabeth II, who attended London Fashion Week in 2018 to mark the inauguration of the Queen Elizabeth II Award, which was won by Richard Quinn.
Here, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of London Fashion Week, Vogue rounds up its all-time favourite front-row moments.
