You can always count on John Alexander Skelton to have uncovered a fascinating corner of British history you were previously unaware of to spark his collections. This season, that was a single (and singular) figure: Anna Maria Garthwaite, an 18th-century silk designer who eschewed the prevailing trends of geometric patterns in favor of floral designs inspired by the plants and herbs that grew within her local streets and the parks of East London. “I was researching the Huguenot silk weavers who fled to Spitalfields in the 18th century from France due to religious persecution, and she was a bit of a revelation,” said Skelton, noting that while records of her life are fairly scant, designs of hers are still held in the collections of the V&A and The Met. “She was kind of the only woman doing it at that level, and she bought her own house, which was rare at the time, so I imagine she must have been quite formidable.”
While much of Spitalfields has been gentrified beyond recognition over the past few decades, you can still get lost wandering its streets of early Georgian terraces with their peeling shutters and weathered brickwork, and feel like you’ve stepped back in time a couple of centuries—exactly the kind of setting that one imagines bears rich creative fruit for Skelton, whose studio is also in a historic East London building. It was across two of these houses that he shot his lookbook: both previously belonged to weavers from that era, and one even came with the original looms and boxes of silk bobbins lying around, as if frozen in time.
This served as an evocative backdrop for a collection that found Skelton in an ever-so-slightly more playful mode, buoyed by the rich array of floral prints inspired by Garthwaite’s work, which Skelton and his team redrew in watercolors before applying them as dainty patterns on jackets and shirts or as lustrous golden silk jacquards. Skelton’s secret sauce is his ability to take his wanderings through history and channel them into a proposition that feels entirely current. The styling—collared striped knits under slubby silk jackets, red work coats cinched at the waist with a fabric belt, a slouchy black-and-gray striped suit with a yellow silk tie—would look just as great in a street style gallery from this month’s men’s shows in Milan and Paris as they do in the decaying grandeur of a historic London house. (The leather shoulder bags, which were tanned with oak bark in the West Country before being decorated with hardware by Skelton’s regular jewelry collaborator, Slim Barrett, were also highly desirable.)
And while Skelton is primarily known as a menswear designer, he’s seen an increasing appetite from women keen to wear his clothes too—hence the inclusion of a handful of female models in the lookbook, who appeared just as at home in his elegantly disheveled buttoned-up jackets and skewiff straw hats made in collaboration with milliner Rachel Frost as the boys. “It started with just women’s shops approaching us and buying the menswear, and as more people began to ask, we started offering smaller sizes,” he explained. “It’s kind of opened up a new avenue for me.”
Still, he’s adamant that he wouldn’t want to spin off womenswear into its own collections. As a master world-builder, he’d have to be able to fold it seamlessly into the men’s lineup or he wouldn’t do it at all. “I spent quite a long time figuring it out, because I’d never done women’s patterns before, but this season we decided to do a few more pieces,” he added. “It’s growing in a more organic way, which is nice.” If there’s one thing Skelton has learned from carefully managing the growth of his brand over the past 10 years, it’s that slow and steady wins the race.
