Steve O Smith is one of the four London designers out of 20 contenders in this year’s semifinals of the LVMH Prize. This means that a lot more people will be able to meet him and marvel at the magical qualities of his collection in the prize showroom. As of now, Smith has never had a show. The response to him snowballed after the Vogue Runway review of his first look book two seasons ago, and he’s had his head down working on private orders ever since.
The term artwear always carries the slightly derogatory implication that something belongs to an “interesting” yet cumbersome niche of the avant-garde. Yet in Smith’s work, all those assumptions dissolve in the lightness of the way he brings his drawings alive. His technique collapses the distance between his garments and the hand-eye energy of how he puts lines on paper. Excuse the pun, but there’s nothing sketchy about it.
The immediacy of his attraction also has to do with Smith’s subject matter, invoking recognizable references to 20th-century fashion while making work that’s completely of today. This season his 14 womenswear and menswear looks captured the outcome of dozens of sketches he made after studying the work of illustrator-artists in the 1930s and ’50s. His source material was The Fleet’s In!, a saucy 1934 painting by Paul Cadmus of a dockside party of ladies (and a gentleman) greeting sailors on leave; the fashion illustrator Eric’s drawings of sailors; and René Gruau’s sketch of a diagonally checked suit by Balmain in 1952.
The result made a delightfully light-as-air merge of the nautical, the erotic, and haute couture, magicked up from organza, lines of black appliqué, near-invisible layerings of tulle, and boned understructure. The technical feats of pattern cutting, draping, mapping tonal shades, and figuring out how to construct corsetry and panniers take Smith and his tiny team hours and hours. Yet the exceptional beauty—the youth and liveliness of it—is precisely how unbelabored looking all that skill and labor turns out to be.
When Smith takes orders, he goes to all lengths to replicate those skills in made-to-measure form. It’s fantasy art made real in a new form of fashion.
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