The imaginitive worlds and communities female designers create around themselves continue to emerge and diversify. Pauline Dujancourt conjures poetry from knitwear: latter-day pre-Raphaelites wrapped in delicate webs of mohair and trailing confusions of chiffon ribbons. After a couple of small presentations, and years honing her sensitive touch and micron-fine stitches into an expressive medium, this was her first time showing on a London runway.
It was a fully-fledged vision, breathing air and emotion into cobwebby cables, fragments of lace and minute crochet flowers. Where there were fastenings—on long chiffon gloves or cardigans—they were tied with ribbons or tiny rolled satin rouleaux bows.
The flowers were the clue to her them—a remembrance of her French grandmother, who taught her to knit. “The collection was about the fact that when I visited her as a child, she had a plant with red flowers that bloomed once a year, on her birthday in February. And I thought this is the time to show it, in Fashion Week.”
Layered as skimpy bodices and baby-shawl knits over cloudy, pouf-ily tiered Victoriana skirts—with some softly tailored jackets and trousers—all of Dujancourt’s work is hand made. In her studio, in the collective space provided by the Paul Smith Foundation at Smithfield Market, hundreds of tiny dark red crochet roses were laid out ready to be sewn into garlands, embedded in chiffon ribbon capes or fashioned into the straps on heart-shaped bags in a 3D floral stitch last weekend. “We did hundreds of crochet flowers,” she said with a laugh after the show. “I don’t think we used them all, but our fingers are quire painful.”
Her all-female team was in tears around her. To anyone who doesn’t know Dujancourt’s background as a sometime knitwear consultant for Simone Rocha and Phoebe English, the completeness of her techniques and aesthetic must have been a surprise. But it is also grounded in reality, and has proven support from buyers. “The brand has been growing quite a lot,” she said. “So having a show now feels like the right time.”
