High glamour was the order of the day for Jenny Packham’s fall collection, which neatly picked up where her pre-fall left off: reveling in the glitter and hedonism of the 1970s. “I was thinking about David Bowie last time, which led me on to Starman and it all got a bit cosmic,” she said. Aside from the first dress in the collection—a showstopping gown in a shade of acrylic-nail red decorated with grids of square sequins and bugle beads, with more of a straight-down ’60s silhouette, the designer was loosely inspired by Anjelica Huston—this was all-out ’70s decadence, with a Packham twist.
As ever, her work with crystals and sequins shone (both figuratively and literally). A sweeping liquid-gold gown featured power shoulders and chunky crystals at the neckline, the latter cascading down the dress like a meteor shower and dissipating into sequins of increasingly finer proportions. A playful black crepe number with a high neck was decorated with bursts of stars on each shoulder fashioned from golden shadow crystals. A particularly pretty gown cut from a silvery diaphanous tulle was layered with further crystals and sequins over the layers of ruched sheer fabric, like a gauzy constellation of stars sheathing the night sky.
“The dresses that make up this galaxy of style aren’t made to sparkle for one night, but to shine on forever,” Packham wrote in the notes accompanying the collection. Decade-hopping her designs might be, but it’s their timelessness that has earned her such a fiercely loyal clientele—and it’s not hard to imagine how these pieces will hang in her customers’ closets for many more decades to come.