Disco, drama, dogs and UK Hun Alison Hammond all landed at the art’otel London Hoxton on Sunday night, September 13th, as rebellious design duo Vin + Omi sent their newest collection, ANARCHY, storming down the runway to classic disco tracks in a display that said ‘the dance floor isn’t dead, the world is just fucked and we are waiting for it to crash and burn before we can reboot it’.
And, frankly, why dress quietly for the impending apocalypse?
VIN + OMI have never been interested in fashion that sits there looking pretty. Their clothes come with politics, experiments, jokes and occasionally bits of rubbish attached. ANARCHY pushed it all into overdrive. The set looked like somebody had raided a recycling centre after closing time: mountains of cardboard boxes were plastered with fluorescent pink animals, faces, barbed-wire motifs and anarchist symbols.
Against it came a parade of punks, club kids, glam monsters and eco-neo-tribal-warriors, looking less like they were walking a traditional fashion show and more like they were heading to the best party happening during societal collapse.
The central idea was waste, specifically, the stuff we have become remarkably good at pretending not to see. VIN + OMI have been examining fly-tipping and forgotten pockets of rubbish around Britain, including through a trial study with Oxford University looking at the way people psychologically tune out litter and environmental damage. Their response is Operation Fly Swat, a wonderfully unglamorous name for a wonderfully practical project involving a roving recycling lorry collecting abandoned waste to be repurposed.
The opening establishes the mood beautifully. A cropped bomber exploded with illustrated panels of snakes, owls, bats and birds beneath repeated ANARCHY lettering, its camouflage lining hanging open over a bare torso. Below it sat tiny, puffed shorts in the same riotous print, while an oversized anarchist symbol fashioned from what looked like bound or wrapped salvaged material hung across the chest like anti-establishment body jewellery. Black patent platform boots finished the look. It was part punk, part fetish, part cartoon apocalypse.
Elsewhere, the collection moved between aggression and something unexpectedly romantic. One of the strongest looks was an enormous black bomber covered in three-dimensional black flowers, each with a jewel-like centre. Seen from behind, it had the proportions of classic streetwear but the surface decoration of couture. That tension, macho bomber jacket versus delicate hand-applied flowers, gave the piece a strange gothic sweetness.
Then came the opposite: a sheer, almost weightless dress floating over underwear, edged in murky blues and pinks. On another runway it could have read ethereal. Here, paired with battered black-and-white trainers, enormous teased blonde hair and a red anarchy symbol painted across the face, it looked like Miss Havisham had discovered squat parties. Pretty, but never precious.
A white suit splattered violently in fluorescent pink was similarly effective. Its exaggerated tailoring and huge, chaotic cloud of pink-and-blonde hair turned corporate uniform into something feral. It was office wear after the office has been abolished, perhaps the most attractive argument for anarchism presented all evening.
And because subtlety was clearly enjoying the night off, there were also sequins. Lots of them. A loose pink sequin boiler suit with giant turquoise patch pockets shimmered somewhere between glam-rock roadie, children’s television presenter and intergalactic mechanic. Punk spikes of hair and graphic face paint prevented the sparkle from becoming remotely polite. Disco wasn’t being deployed nostalgically here. It felt defiant: if everything is collapsing, put on something ridiculous and keep moving.
The horrors persist, but so does disco.
ANARCHY wasn’t nihilistic so much as mischievously furious. A voluminous white garment daubed repeatedly with the words “STOP FUCKING THE PLANET” probably delivered the evening’s thesis most efficiently. There is little room for misinterpretation.
But beneath all the theatrical rage was an impressive amount of material research. VIN + OMI’s ongoing relationship with King Charles III has produced another unlikely fashion material, with trimmed cork-barked oak branches and waste nettles from Sandringham turned into garments. Finnish Lapland-based Northern Sámi felt artist Joanna Jompan combined eco-dyed British nettle fibres with no-kill Finnish fleece to create felted collars. Waste paint tubes from Daler-Rowney were recycled into micro-bonded rPET printed dresses, while other pieces reworked clothing sourced through British Heart Foundation charity shops and military bases. Even discarded linen from the show venue, art’otel London Hoxton, made its way onto the catwalk.
VIN + OMI’s runway has long been less interested in fashion’s traditional human coat hangers than in assembling a gang, with models spanning generations and worlds. This season brought a particularly delicious piece of British pop-cultural chaos with Dame Prue Leith reunited with Alison Hammond on the catwalk, both wearing looks created using textiles derived from plastic recovered through the designers’ clean-up schemes. Jane Moore and Jo Wood joined the proceedings too.
Queen drummer Roger Taylor added another strand to an evening already operating at approximately 150 per cent capacity. The show was used to launch his track A Beautiful World, from Violence Insane In A Beautiful World, accompanied by a collaborative video with VIN + OMI juxtaposing the beauty of nature with the damage being inflicted upon it.
There was beauty everywhere in ANARCHY, but VIN + OMI kept vandalising it. Flowers appeared on bombers. Glamorous tailoring was attacked with paint. Delicate transparent fabric was dragged through punk styling. Sequins became workwear. Waste became decoration. The anarchy symbol migrated from the cardboard scenery to jewellery, mouths, faces and headpieces until it became less a logo than punctuation.
For all the talk of environmental crisis, ANARCHY never felt like a funeral. It was much closer to a disco at the end of civilisation: camp, angry, funny, glamorous, occasionally grotesque and determined to squeeze pleasure out of the mess we’ve created.
The planet might be fucked, but VIN + OMI have found beauty, humour and one hell of a party in the rubble.
Words by Lewis Robert Cameron
Designer: @vinandomi
Catwalk photography by Fil Mazzarino @filmazzarino
Key make-up artist @gozralozano
Lead assistant @xalicemakeupx
Hair Lead @ellafisherhair
Location @artotellondonhoxton
Sponsored by @jagermeisteruk
