After weeks of endless gray drizzle in London (but what’s new about that) it was a tonic to step into the colorful world of Duro Olowu on a particularly gloomy Tuesday afternoon. Seated in a friend’s apartment in a historic Chelsea apartment building, and with the bright colors of an abstract painting by Marina Adams in the background, Olowu was ready to unveil his fall collection in his own inimitable style. Namely with a few models parading his latest set of maximalist tailoring around the living room, while Olowu himself provided a running commentary.
Only this time Olowu’s starting point was not a film or a book (as is usually the case), but rather a mood. While there were still many flashes of his signature bold prints, the print that came back the most was one of multicolored stripes, which Olowu deliberately desaturated through a process he compared to the color grading of a film; more specifically, he referred to the idea of taking Powell and Pressburger’s Technicolor The red shoes and dialing it back to something more muted. “I didn’t want it to be too loud,” Olowu said. “It’s about comfort and self-confidence.”
This care, precision (and ease) was evident in the meticulous construction of each piece: 1950s-inspired leopard print car coats with plenty of satisfying accents; a striped shawl-collar shirt with pleated skirt, so fitted that every stripe lines up perfectly, even across the cinched waist; jackets cut from feather-light, textured silk rayon to wear as dresses in the summer; Dresses with peasant sleeves, cut from a plethora of artfully clashing patterns, sewn together from vintage Italian fabrics and prints of Olowu’s own design. Perhaps the most surprising new contribution to Olowu’s canon? Hoodies: sewn together from dazzling combinations of floral velvet and shimmering iridescent brocades.
But as always, the devil was in the details; from the elegant draping of a skirt to the soft raised shoulders of a fitted dress that balanced the cinched waist. “It’s about using volume, not to obscure things, but to accentuate,” Olowu noted. His eye for color and print will always dazzle, but it’s still the thoughtful subtleties that shine the brightest.
