Christopher Kane’s latest was a real horror show, but, like, literally. Or literarily, rather. Kane, the cutting-edge wunderkind whose derring-do steps into extraterrestrial territory every season, is looked to by the London fashion pack when they crave invention and innovation instead of reinvention and reinterpretation. He’ll work with textiles that have never been used before, fashion a dress out of elusive ghost fabric, or transmute nebulas from the cosmos onto dresses. Kane’s vision is astonishingly developed for a designer so young.

However, Kane is a tricky cad and doesn’t reveal his cards too soon. The show starts out all sweetness and light, showing a series of virginal white looks as pure as the driven snow – sidenote: in a horror movie, the virgin is always the heroine. A motorcycle jacket sporting oversized, structured sleeves is paired with a skirt that is slim through the waist and hips. A vinyl tunic is layered over a tiered skirt. Blush-pink looks followed the white, and Kane experimented with stacked folds that looked like Christmas candy. Microscopic fringe in pink and yellow adorned body-con dresses that were so tight they looked painted on. His later references to Frankenstein’s monster spoke to the underlying direction of this collection, as did the unusual materials the likes of shower caps, rubber, gaffer’s tape, and dresses held together by plastic bolts. Is this the arsenal of a serial killer coming into strange focus on the back of so much beauty? Or is Kane just playing cat-and-mouse?

written by GRACE GORDON|photos: courtesy of GoRUNWAY