By Stuart Everitt
Where Fashion Is All Relative: Suzy Menkes speaks with Christopher and Tammy Kane, the brother and sister behind a British fashion success story.
LONDON — Christopher Kane has a word for the Barbie dolls grouped in his studio wearing miniature versions of his perky, girlish fashion creations.
“Evil!” says the designer in his soft Scottish accent. “They look like they could come alive at night.”
A fashion blend of sweet innocence and a hint of a dark side is the leitmotif of Mr. Kane who, with his sister Tammy, has built up a small, but profitable fashion house in London’s gritty East End. The company now has the backing of the Paris-based Kering luxury group, giving a big future to the designer, whose 30th-birthday cards are on his office wall.
“We were looking for young talent and at names that could be interesting,” said François-Henri Pinault, chairman and chief executive of Kering (formerly PPR), “so we met Christopher and saw him in Paris and London. There was something so touching about him and his sister,” Mr. Pinault said, explaining how he came to buy a controlling stake in Mr. Kane’s company.
The supersiblings do not read as a dynamic duo as they sit in their studio in Dalston, a hip hang-out for the start-up generation, but mostly a low-income neighborhood that could be a poster for London’s multicultural population. Only a roll of fabric in Day-Glo shocking pink, a few framed drawings and the Barbies light up the gray and grungy industrial building, where the ancient elevator bears a sign: “Please wait for the ‘bang’ before opening the gate.”
Mr. Kane reminisces about the first memorable dress he made, out of lace hosiery fabric that he bought at a Dalston market, and which is now on display at the “Punk: Chaos to Couture” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. “That dress must have cost £5 to make,” Mr. Kane said, referring to the equivalent of less than $8 today. “That’s what Punk really was, so D.I.Y. — but it was such a fresh idea,” he said, adding that he had been afraid to take the dress to Louise Wilson, his mentor at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, but that she had loved it.
Lace has become his design symbol over the past seven years — as cute, full-skirt dresses, as a sliver of a sheath or neon- bright corsets. Then there are the complex faces and figures, like frozen digital images, created as spider-web lacy inserts in the new Resort collection being offered to buyers this week.
Christopher Kane collections are remarkable for their tumble of ideas, often from the cyberworld, and for their craftsmanship , using unexpected, hyper-modern fabrics. The winter 2013 collection was inspired by brain scans made with magnetic resonance imaging, which the designer explains by saying nonchalantly, “I love science and I am very intrigued how the brain works — for me it’s a miracle and it’s so graphic and looks so modern — and we all have one!”
“He’s one of the few people recently who reflects his time, representing his generation,” said Ms. Wilson, whose firm, enthusiastic and sometimes scathing teaching nurtured a generation of bright British fashion designers through Saint Martins. “It is not a fantasy world, it is his world, but it does not feel revisited, it is fresh.”
Christopher and Tammy Kane, who were raised in the 1980s on “bad TV,” as Mr. Kane puts it, were born into a large family in the North Lanarkshire area of Scotland, where the closing of the local steel factory in 1992 broke the spirit of a generation. “It was really a normal working-class family lifestyle: mum stayed at home and father came back at 6.00 p.m.,” Ms. Kane said. She describes how she and her brother found “an alliance in each other” as they drew, “ruining the carpets,” and following the path of their father, a draftsman. Her brother describes hanging out in front of a new multichannel TV — “the more rubbishy the better” — with his mother and “Auntie Sandra and Auntie Mary.”
The Kane vision of this domestic bliss might account for little dresses, with intense decoration and detail, and for their shared passion for the Versace look in the raunchier body-con dresses. At age 12, Mr. Kane saved his pocket money to buy 17- year-old Tammy a Versace wet-look minidress.
“As a child, Donatella and Gianni were the pinups — meeting Donatella the first time literally set my heart pounding through my T-shirt,” said Mr. Kane, who ultimately was chosen by Ms. Versace to resuscitate the hip Versus collection that she had created when her brother was alive.
“Christopher is very creative in fashion — he’s full of ideas, really exceptional — and I’ll tell you why,” Ms. Versace said last week. “He is very special in putting weird fabrics together from different materials — ones that don’t even make sense.” She added: “The difference between him and other designers is that they’re more concerned about looking cool than making contemporary clothes.”
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