Affairs of the heart have consumed Christopher Kane of late. “I’m always falling in love,” he said blithely while presenting his new collection this week. But there was also the heartbreak of his mother’s death earlier this year, just before he showed a Fall collection with an explicit, erotic “lover’s lace” motif. That’s a whole gamut of emotions right there, and Resort suggested Kane is still running it.
He made the heart his focus, as a symbol of love, of life, and of something stranger. There were traditional love hearts embroidered and printed on skirts and dresses, and then there was aqua lace and liquid silk stitched together with what looked like the surgical suturing that would follow a heart transplant. The emotional and the clinical, the sensual and the scientific, classic Kane contradictions, but no more classic than the face-off between innocence and experience that he was also talking about. For innocence, there was an outfit he called a “gospel dress,” properly mid-length, with a big Quaker collar, and another dress in pleated georgette printed with little hearts that would suit a Sunday school teacher just fine. But it’s nothing as basic as old-time religion with Kane (even though he and sister Tammy were raised Catholic in Glasgow, Scotland, near a spot where the Virgin Mary made one of her miraculous appearances). He is obsessed with cults, particularly the one that surrounded Jim Jones, so it’s faith gone bad that underpins some of those proper looks of his. And that sounds properly ambiguous, which probably accounts for why innocence doesn’t always work for the designer. It can turn sickly sweet, like the tulle princess dress with the little molecule pattern. (Mind you, the very notion of sickliness is probably magic to Kane. He nurtures the extreme response.)
No such problems with experience. Counterpointing the pale aquas and lilacs and Kane’s favorite shade of nude was a hellaciously worldly red, ravishing in a full-length sheath of red lace hearts. The “Elizabeth Taylor” dress was an off-the-shoulder black sheath decorated with black lace hearts and chunky heart-shaped crystals. (One of Richard Burton’s gifts to Taylor was the Taj Mahal diamond, the same size and shape as Kane’s crystals.)
The same decorative element was used as the closure on a devilishly chic cutaway tuxedo jacket, a new emphasis on tailoring being one side effect of Kane now having a more direct pipeline to his customer through the store he just opened in Mayfair. He said the longer lengths were also the result of customer feedback. The ladies of London asked, Kane answered, with a gorgeous pleated sundress falling to mid-calf, or a sinuous lace thing in sober navy, which the designer topped with a lab coat made of Swiss lace sandwiched between two barely there layers of plastic. This curiously clinical touch was echoed in the red leather elbow gloves with the black heart appliqué that Kane paired with the pleated sundress. “Dr. Love and Dr. Death,” he said cryptically. And maybe that’s his own version of Alexander McQueen’s touchstones, beauty and horror.
