Mad Awks

>> Yesterday’s quote from Chloe’s House of Voltaire tag has lingered with me – “The Beautiful is Always Strange.” This sentiment perhaps didn’t always resonate so strongly, especially in fashion. The “strange” was once upon a time feared and derided as being the opposite of beautiful. Now the “strange” has almost become a commodity for everyone to latch on to in order to establish a point of difference in what is a crowded market. In amongst the new generation of designers who mish and mash up genres to try and eke out the new, the “strange”, or specifically in the young Canadian, London-based designer Steven Tai‘s case the “awkward” is part of his brand’s raison d’être. Tai has openly revelled in geeky girls, bookish nerds and gawky awkwardness ever since he graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2012.

It’s not a forced thing with Tai though. He naturally gravitates towards these female underdog slash wallflower characters because he himself relates to them on a personal level. For S/S 15, Tai looked at the manic scribblings of Emma Hauck, who was admitted into a psychiatric hospital in 1909, where she obsessively wrote to her absent husband Mark in a journal in an often illegible script (I thank the brilliant Letters of Note blog for information on Hauck). “Come, come, come,” Hauck’s handwriting pleaded and so it is that Tai’s collection is also similarly enticing with its oversized time travelling silhouettes, oscillating between aprons and pleated skirts of early 20th century school uniforms and workwear to dungarees, bomber jackets and tracksuit bottoms of 90s sportswear. Doo-rag caps and basketball kit shapes somehow look displaced out of their original context, which is mainly down to Tai’s fabrications and colour choices. Shades of denim indigo and touches of mint green and lemon yellow in embroidered cotton tulle, pleated vertex and spongey grid-like mesh ball point pen etched cottons make up an intriguing textiles trajectory in the collection, a particular strength of Tai’s. Memories of hip hop outfits and youth-imbued sportswear wouldn’t be half as interesting were it not for Tai’s deft hand in custom made fabrications.

Since the last time I wrote about Tai and his page turning, book-inspired graduate collection, Tai has had the exposure of being a part of VFiles’ first group NYFW show, selected as an ANDAM Prize finalist and also in Vogue Italia’s ‘Vogue Talents’ exhibition in Milan (which means his equally lush A/W 14-5 collection is currently on sale on TheCorner.com). Commercialising his particular brand of “geek chic” has been a challenge but the collections have progressively grown stronger as Tai makes the “Mad Awks” look his own.