Patrick McDowell sure knows how to put on a show. For their latest spectacle tonight at the Rambert Dance Company’s South Bank studios, the designer collaborated with a number of the group’s dancers to create an immersive catwalk experience cheekily titled ‘A Tragedy of Fashion’. That also turned out to be the name of Rambert’s first production from 1926: a radically inventive ballet in which a thread was spun from a doomed fashion designer who ultimately impaled himself on his own cutting scissors. “When I discovered that, I started digging deeper into the archive, and that’s really where the project came from,” says McDowell.
Prints were designed using photos of founder Marie Rambert’s dancing shoes, while garment bags were recreated in luxurious silk and Tencel fibers. With the help of McDowell’s sustainable wizardry, many of the dresses featured upcycled vintage silk sourced from mills in Italy, mycelium filling and a handful of textiles sourced from Rambert himself – especially the closing look, delivered with suitably theatrical panache by one of the dancers, made from dozens of tulle skirts that languished in a closet from a performance decades ago.
And in a moment of circularity – in both senses of the word – a piece from the collection will find a new home in the Rambert Archives, joining the lavish costumes that first fueled McDowell’s inspiration for the collection. “Who knows,” McDowell said. “Maybe in another hundred years it can inspire someone else.”
