This season I have responded to two very different sources that evoked for me the same idea and feeling.
I love Barefoot In The Park, the 1967 romantic comedy starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford as newly-weds in Manhatten who don’t yet truly know each other.
In the pivotal scene stick-in-the-mud Robert Redford goes barefoot in the park in the middle of winter to prove to bohemian Jane Fonda he can change.
Within the glamour and bustle of 1960’s New York the world is changing. Jane Fonda is pushing to be free of the conventional expectations of women represented by the formality and constraint of the public garden.
I also found an image by William Morris, a medieval looking portrait of Guinevere and Isolde, two famous queens, both caught in love triangles and trapped by society’s expectations of their duty.
Morris placed these two heroines in a cultivated and constrained park setting, again symbolising the overriding powers that held them at bay.
I thought about the ways women continually juggle the freedom of being themselves in a society of constraint.
I designed this collection with those feelings, motivated by the desire to see women express themselves through clothing that allows them to be themselves.
I explored different prints, textures, shapes and colour to create a range that can be played with in so many ways.
A collection that can allow women to be themselves, powerful, soft, elegant and strong.
