The final day of London Fashion Week kicked off with two fantastic shows. First up was Anya Hindmarch, who has developed a reputation for truly innovative productions (last season Cascade featured an extraordinary display of cascading dominoes that magically triggered bags to rise from hidden locations). For this year's show, “Out of this World,” she went with an interplanetary theme that saw the bags appear and float through space—just at eye level for the front row, conveniently.
The bags themselves were covetable items as ever, relying on highest-quality material: ostrich and crocodile.
The bags were mute and understated. Hindmarch’s trademark geometric shapes were much in evidence, but aside from a few printed with planets, there were no logos, just solid colors.
The show ended with a model flying through the air holding a red bag in front of her—and a storm of applause.
After that, it was up to view Stella McCartney for Adidas. McCartney, who designed the Team GB outfits for last year's Olympics, had converted a large warehouse into a massive gym, where proper athletes rather than models showed off her tasty new range of sportswear to banging music.
At one end, a giant fish tank had synchronized swimmers. Next to that were practitioners of aerial yoga from an East London group, who performed inverse lotus positions hanging from the sky, while other well-dressed gym bunnies worked out on spinners and giant treadmills.
Was McCartney trying to singlehandedly put the bonkers back into London Fashion Week?
"Yes, with a capital B," she tells Fashion Beast. "People don't have to be ashamed of their sportswear anymore. These leggings, for example, you could wear them to work out and then drop in to the pub on the way home without being embarrassed."