Great bags, great shoes. Best to reassure the folks back at Mulberry HQ their all-important accessories business will do just fine next season, before going on to note this afternoon’s show by the brand was a bit of a puzzle. It was plain enough that Johnny Coca, the brand’s creative director, was enamored of the oh-so-English heritage codes that dominate the Mulberry vernacular; it was less clear what message he was trying to send by means of them.
The home counties references dominated this collection, from the generous helping of brownish check to the quilted capes inspired by horse blankets. Evening looks had a bit of the black-tie-for-dinner manner that’s custom at country houses after a shoot. But for all the familiarity of these motifs, they had an alien effect here, thanks to Coca’s preference for attenuated or vastly oversize proportions. To wit, Thatcherite check skirt suits paired with pussybow blouses featured oddball hemlines and strangely exaggerated shoulders. (It must be noted the Iron Lady herself never required an exaggerated jacket shoulder to assert her presence in a room.) The evening dresses, which featured some magnificent fabrications, were distended to such a degree they almost completely effaced the underlying female form—an effect amplified by Coca’s eiderdown-like blanket capes. In theory, this kind of space-taking should read as authoritative, but as a general matter, there wasn’t enough of a sense of specificity to Coca’s silhouettes to see anything except, well, largeness.
In a funny way, this very polished collection felt unfinished. There was a plethora of good ideas here—terrific fabrics, as noted, some wonderful play with color, and some interesting perversions of the horsey-set look—but too many of these garments seemed to swamp the models wearing them, and they should have been refined further to ameliorate that effect. Toying with proportions like these is a tricky business, and not many designers do it well; those who do have one eye turned, at all times, to the woman they envision wearing the clothes. Coca, on the other hand, was going for impact. As a result, this may turn out to be one of those collections that do better in the showroom, where the clothes being wholesaled showcase good ideas, properly distilled.
