Hard,
soft, deal or no deal; Brexit is a complex, chaotic battlefield. One thing,
however, is certain: in a UK divided over its future, the Remainers have the
cool kids on their team. Wolfgang Tillmans and Vivienne Westwood have created
work for the cause; Tom Dixon, Alexa Chung, Idris Elba and Thomas Heatherwick
are all vehemently pro-EU.
The Brexit side has . . . Right Said Fred and Joan
Collins. “Is she still alive?” asks Katharine Hamnett with an arched eyebrow
and a mischievous smile. The 70-year-old designer is sitting in her stark
Shoreditch studio wearing her “Cancel Brexit” T-shirt. In a crowd of creatives
waving the European flag, she still stands out. Having taken a long hiatus from
the high-end fashion scene, Hamnett has decided to stage a full-throttle return
at an opportune time.
In September, she re-launched her high-end, independent
label with a 34-piece collection, based on re-issues of her archive, using the
Katharine Hamnett London label as a key graphic across a series of sweats.
“This year has been a soft launch,” she explains. “We’ve been tinkering, to
make sure we do it right. We have reasonable private backing and access to more
if we need it.”
The response has been positive and immediate. Many of her
original 1980s customers have been buying the same utilitarian unisex silk
shirts and pleated brace trousers they loved the first time round, and while
the relaunch has been focused online initially, selling directly via
KatharineHamnett.com, the collection will soon be going into Liberty and
Matches among other bricks-and-mortar retailers. More importantly, the clothes
look freshly minted, as if designed yesterday.
Hamnett first founded her
eponymous company in 1979, going on to build a British fashion empire (with a
£100m-a-year turnover in Japan alone) based on workwear chic, military styles
and agitprop slogan T-shirts. The T-shirts, printed with the antiwar moniker
“Choose Life”, and worn by Wham on Top of the Pops, were simple, strong and
designed to go viral long before the term existed.
When she wore her “58% don’t
want Pershing” oversized T-shirt next to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street,
in 1984, the photobomb became one of the most reproduced images of the decade.
“It’s so powerful to say something in a short sentence,” she explains of the
continuing power of a slogan T-shirt (which will be a key focus of the Fashion
and Textile Museum’s forthcoming exhibition T-shirt: Cult, Culture, Subversion,
in February 2018). “It gets immediately inside your brain without a filter,”
she continues.
“Even if we’ve only sold a couple of hundred of the Cancel
Brexit T-shirts, they’ve gone to the right people. They’ve been photographed in
the front row at Dior.” Hamnett’s comeback this time is due to an unlikely
alliance. The rapper Kanye West is a fan of her work and, at his request, she
had her archive of 1,479 garments photographed and self-published as a
reference for his Yeezy collection he endorses for Adidas.
At the same time,
she collaborated with the London-based YMC label on a capsule collection of her
classics. “It all gave me a new confidence in the designs,” she says of her
label’s new-found relevance and appeal. “They had gone through the fashion
cycle and come out as strong as before. A lot of it was originally inspired by
street fashion. And that’s what’s happening in fashion at the moment.
I
remember driving around Highbury in the ’80s and seeing a bunch of black kids
playing football, and the way they looked was a lightbulb moment. They looked
incredible. The work was all about the street and multicultural style.” The
first time around, Hamnett was very much the grown-up in a London fashion scene
dominated by club kids fresh out of Central Saint Martins. “We started with a
five-hundred quid loan from a family friend,” she recalls.
But she quickly went
on to have vast international distribution, a Brompton Road flagship store
designed by Norman Foster and monochrome advertising campaigns shot by Ellen
Von Unwerth and Juergen Teller that were as influential and iconic as Calvin
Klein’s. Then, in 1989, at the peak of her success, Hamnett commissioned an
impact study into her business and the environment. And closed the brand.
“The
reports were appalling,” she says of her decision. “The environmental issues
surrounding the textiles and the pesticide poisoning, the deaths from
industrial accidents and workers living in slave conditions . . . it had to
change, and it was hard. Even trying to get organic cotton was impossible, no
one was doing it.”
Instead of trying to phase in changes, she demanded a revolution overnight. Subsequently, Hamnett as a business proved as sustainable as the mass-market fabrics she was rejecting. “Today it’s totally different,” she says, pointing at piles of swatch books on her desk. “We’ve got sustainable recycled polyester, and sustainable alpaca from Peru in natural colours. Swiss mills are making the most beautiful organic cotton.
I don’t know why Burberry aren’t
using it for all their clothes — they f**cking charge enough!” Hamnett is a
fearless national treasure and industry troublemaker. She’s worked with
high-street chains on developing eco-friendly lines, and exposed corruption in
factories. She is a disrupter with a great eye and an even greater sense of
conviction. After the Iraq invasion, she surprised everyone by joining the
Conservative party. “I was so disgusted by Tony Blair that I wanted to feel I
was as far away from him as possible,” she says. “I’m a member of the Labour
party today, but I also believe we should turn up at our MPs’ surgeries and
tell them we won’t vote for them if they don’t represent our views.”
Which
brings us to her current bête noire. “I’ve yet to see a single benefit to the
UK leaving the EU,” she says. “It’s suicide. Around 80 per cent of our food is
imported from the EU. It’s going to hit the poorest hardest. Anyone with a
brain is Remain.” It’s so powerful to say something ina short sentence. It gets
immediately inside your brain Despite being one of the biggest names in British
fashion, Katharine Hamnett in 2017 is in effect a start-up and she’s a
businesswoman as much as a designer with a conscience.
Being outside the
world’s largest trading bloc will put the fashion industry in the UK in its
most precarious position ever. “We’ll have import duty on most of the fabrics
we use,” says Hamnett, “and our cotton industry is long gone. Things will
collapse. Look at the trade deal the EU just made with Japan. That could have
revitalised the whole of the British fashion industry, because Japan used to
see ‘Made in Britain’ and it meant something to them.” But Hamnett is powering
ahead with both business and campaigning. She is nothing if not optimistic. If
she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have come back. Despite so many loud voices in
fashion, hers is one that still has something to say.
Source: FT