If one trend has defined this edition of London Fashion Week, it’s been abstaining from the whole affair—in terms of physical participation, at least, with a number of brands choosing to release collections via lookbook. Among them is Carly Mark, the between-London-and-Paris based creative director of Puppets and Puppets, who staged a conceptually ambitious, though somewhat feather-ruffling presentation at the ICA last season. There weren’t actually any new clothes on show, and the designer presented looks styled from high street clothing as the backdrop for a series of new accessories.
While it was an intriguing premise, invoking the tradition of fashion-as-art provocateurs like Bernadette Corporation, Honey-Suckle Company and BLESS, it fell a little flat in its failure to adequately spotlight the bags that Mark was trying to sell. “It was such a trial run for a new way of speaking in a new Puppets and Puppets language,” Mark said today. “There were pros and cons to the presentation format, but this season I really thought about how to include the bags in a way that feels more concrete. I have to, because this is too great a financial undertaking not to, and so I thought that doing something with fashion image would pack a clearer, more powerful punch.”
Fueled by a shift in perspective, this season she teamed up with Danish fine art photographer Nicolai Howalt on a series of pared-back images of models styled in off-the-rack high street pieces, five-euro scarves copped from kiosks in Paris’s outer arrondissements and vintage furs. Leaning into the liminal space between fashion and art that the brand has long occupied, the styling drew upon “these really iconic caricatures of artists’ style—Dalí, Yoko Ono, Picasso, Lucian Freud,” Mark said. “I took inspiration from the way that they dress and mixed it with other things that I’m experiencing, like the bits of graffiti you see walking around Paris,” which translated to the freeform tags that decorated ribbed cotton rompers and poplin shirts.
The images themselves were stark and compelling, and this season, Mark did a notably better job of integrating her bags into the wider proposal. Developments on the pillow-shaped satchel she debuted last season—now featuring chic logoed hardware detailing—in poppy faux snakeskin appeared more prominently in the pictures than they did last time.
Nevertheless, the accessories still played second fiddle to the styling—which, frankly, was fine. After all, there are numerous examples of brands across fashion that prioritized high-concept image production over the presentation of product. One case in point is Benetton, a reference on Mark’s moodboard this season. Granted, there remains some finessing to be done around where exactly this new chapter sits: “Is this an art practice? Is this a fashion project? Is it both? And is there a difference between those things?” Mark rhetorically pondered. Still, this felt like a convincing step towards resolve, gesturing at something with the potential to be a genuinely exciting, parameter-broadening approach to fashion practice.
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