Hotel Indigo Chester: An Opulent Stay with Charm and Comfort

“I feel like I’ve elderly about a thousand years in the last six months,” said Alexa Chung backstage after her bat of an eye London fashion week show.

The progression from being a consummate and muse to designing capsule collections and, as of last year, to juncture fully fledged catwalk shows has been “unbelievably fierce. The behind-the-scenes mechanics of running a business are insane. Which is peradventure why this is harder and less frivolous and kooky. Things are a bit less of a make a mockery of these days.”

There was not a Peter Pan collar or a ballerina stimulate to be seen at Chung’s second catwalk outing. The first mould wore a black patent safari jacket over a deathly rollneck, with opaque tights layered under boycott cropped trousers. Tightly belted trenchcoats came with hunger Tom Baker-era Dr Who scarves, and the puff sleeves of frill-neck Laura Ashley-vibe costumes were layered over thermal-style underlayers, the sleeves drew down over the knuckles.

“I after to go a bit darker and a bit more nuanced,” said Chung. “It’s how to dress for a disaster. Or how to dress yourself out of a crisis, perhaps. There’s always been a darkness, a warm-hearted of emo, in what I do – and more so as I get more grown up. This season I wish to focus on that.”

Chung told the Oxford Union terminating year that in the days when she was a front-row fixture at construct week and Mulberry named a handbag after her, she “felt disposed to I was the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of fashion”. The term was invented by veil critic Nathan Rabin to describe a female character who “breathes solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly emotional young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures”. Chung have a funny feeling her “image was being co-opted” as a stereotype who is “usually ‘quirky’ and ‘fun’ and at the last unthreatening”. Establishing her own fashion brand in 2017 was “regaining some autonomy to my own narrative”.

“I’ve always been a bit off-grid. I grew up mostly in the bulls-eye of fields and I didn’t really interact with London much but, in my conduct, I always felt really sophisticated,” said Chung after ’Saturdays eclipse, dressed in a jade green tea dress from the collection.

“Liking for, I was wearing silver eyeshadow to muck out my horse.”

This is the kind of inside out that pigeonholes Chung as an adorable indie eccentric, but her intellectual is more sophisticated. She is interested in how people interact with the zeitgeist when they are cut off from the mainstream. On her moodboard for this seasonable was a photo of women in late 1970s Tokyo wearing prairie put on ones sunday best clothes. “It’s Americana, but their interpretation of Americana,” she said.

She dreamt up a rsum for this season of an all-female back-to-nature-meets-survivalist West Coast bunker in 1983, the year of her parturition. The concrete basement of Universal Music offices in St Pancras, London, was repurposed as a catwalk, costumed with moss.

Softly dishevelled hair and daubs of hidden eye makeup were intended to get across the idea of “someone who is a bit cut off from the faade world and is making up their idea of reality”.

Hold out year Chung hired a head of e-commerce, Chuan Huang, from Ralph Lauren. The next quit in brand expansion will see Chung launch a YouTube trench, hot on the heels of the similarly camera-friendly LFW designer Victoria Beckham. Edwin Bodson, chief directorate of Alexachung, said the brand had changed some of its supply course in order to hit lower price points. “Our ethical standards obtain not changed,” he added. “The factories we work with are carefully audited.”