“London’s Always Where You See The Future Coming”: Sarah Mower Looks Back On 40 Years Of Capital Style

Everyone asks how. It’s the hordes of nonconformist fashion students who converge on London colleges and the tutors who teach them never to be derivative. It’s the energy and creativity of globally connected, multicultural communities from all around the UK. It’s the influence of every club and subcultural dresscode, from new romantics to rave, acid house, ragga, electroclash, nu rave, garage, grime, UK jazz; all the underground parties where the young have ever found their people; friends who’ve together decided to start something out of almost nothing except their outrageous, exuberant will to make a mark, have their say.

If I cast my mind back to the ’80s, Vivienne Westwood, Katharine Hamnett, BodyMap, Antony Price, Rifat Ozbek, John Galliano, Jasper Conran, Bruce Oldfield, Joe Casely-Hayford were making it happen. Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street, and Diana, Princess of Wales and what she wore was obsessing the world. And although nobody was particularly pointing to it in these feminist years of power-shouldered women in the boardroom (or so the myth went), London was fielding streams of strong female designers of many generations: Jean Muir, Zandra Rhodes, Wendy Dagworthy, Betty Jackson, Ninivah Khomo, Bella Pollen, Helen Storey, Tanya Sarne’s label Ghost, English Eccentrics by the Littman sisters.