Since returning to Britain from Ukraine in 2021, Masha Popova has not lived in a single place for more than six months. The London rental market and its web of precarious sublets is brutal, but the designer has found ways to romanticize her itinerant lifestyle by looking at Sophie Calle’s 1984 project, The Hotel, in which the artist spent three weeks posing as a chambermaid in a Venice pensione, photographing with voyeuristic detail the personal traces guests left behind in their rooms (lipstick-stained handkerchiefs, bottles of medicine, the crease on a bedsheet where someone laid.) “I recognized those temporary spaces and how it feels to be inside of them,” said Popova in a preview of her fall collection in her east London studio. “I move around so much that I don’t even unpack.”
This season’s proposal—shown by way of a lookbook and film shot at The Langham Hotel—was Popova’s most autobiographical to date: an attempt at finding a sense of comfort amid constant movement. She presented indigo bombers with the fuzzy shawl collars of a resort bathrobe, striped shirts with trailing scarves resembling slept-in bedspreads, and two-tone corduroys calling to mind the weathered textiles of an old-school suite. It was only upon closer inspection that the clothes revealed glimpses of their own fleeting transience. The straps on a cowl-back mini dress slipped from the shoulders, while the zippers on double-layered pencil skirts were half-jammed at the knee—gestures interrupted in the act of leaving. “I’ve always wanted to capture the idea of lived-in clothes,” the designer said. “To tell the story of the person inside them.”
This brings us to Popova’s core denim offering, which, alongside her signature bias-cut bootlegs, included skinnies with protective wax judiciously applied to leave only some areas exposed to the natural aging process. The long hems on spaghetti-strapped dresses were treated with sticky resin, as if splattered in petrol. An integrated jersey hoodie and sleeveless blazer had been distressed with a septic-brown dye. “The pristine look of new clothes feels soulless and dead to me,” said the designer, unveiling a pair of slouchy white boots—scuffed while shooting these images and left unrestored by the time she physically presented the collection at the British Fashion Council’s Newgen showroom. “Garments, like humans, become more beautiful with age,” she said. “These imperfections are imprints of life.”
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