To be named the inaugural winner in a new category of the LVMH Prize is a monumental achievement. And as Michael Stewart said before today’s show, that category being dedicated to craft made it especially sweet. “To win the prize for savoir-faire in Paris, where the culture is dedicated to that specific thing, is absolute insanity,” he said. Of the process of speaking with that organization’s formidable jury, he added: “These are all people who really understand craft.”
Today we saw another first for Stewart and Standing Ground: the label’s first solo runway outing. Because the designer only makes pieces to order (something he said he was repeatedly quizzed on back in Paris this week) today acted as a kind of trans-seasonal trunk show.
Its closing khaki dress was the supreme example of Stewart’s celebrated technique. Two layers of jersey had been draped and cut over the wearer’s body, before Stewart drew the contours his instinct told him to apply. These drawings were then digitized to make the design symmetrical and then applied as stitching to the layers of jersey, before hundreds of microbeads were inserted in the pockets of space that remained.
An adapted version of the same technique was applied to Stewart’s first ever leather pieces: lines of leather-wrapped beads ran vertically down the back of his jacket and coat in a form that resembled some semi-terrestrial’s spinal cord. Elsewhere he fabric-submerged beads wound around little fin-like ridges of padding peplum and sections of shirred and ruched material. All this crafted textural tension served to envelop the forms they clad in a statuesque embrace, while new experiments in lushly draped and sometimes cowled velvet had a Giovanni Strazza fluidity to them.
These clothes looked simultaneously ceremonial, futuristic and ancient: to attempt to mass produce and wholesale pieces that evoke the meditative state Standing Ground musters would compromise what makes them so inherently special. Accessories, however, could represent a way to scale and support Stewart’s core venture as it expands.
