Two Countries in One Wardrobe

Britain has never had a single fashion identity. It has, instead, two — and the tension between them has produced most of what is distinctive about British dress.

The first is Savile Row. The bespoke tailoring trade established itself in Mayfair in the mid-eighteenth century and codified itself in the nineteenth: Henry Poole on Savile Row from 1846; Beau Brummell's cult of the impeccable simple suit; Prince Albert's mourning wardrobe that made black the Victorian colour. By 1900 the Row was the global standard for men's formal dress, and it is, in a diminished form, still operating — Ozwald Boateng, Richard James, Anderson & Sheppard continue the trade under the sign of bespoke craft.

The second is the street. London, alone among European capitals, has consistently produced fashion from below — from the Teddy Boys of the 1950s to the Mods of the 1960s to the Punks of 1976, each movement dressed first by its participants and only later by its designers. Mary Quant, on the King's Road from 1955, was the first to sell this street vocabulary back to its source at scale. Vivienne Westwood, from 1971 onward, did the same for punk. No other country in Europe has a comparable tradition of youth-led sartorial revolution.

The Quant Revolution and After

Quant's Bazaar on the King's Road did something Paris couture had never dreamed of: it sold clothes designed for a seventeen-year-old shopgirl to a seventeen-year-old shopgirl, on a wage she could afford. The mini skirt, which Quant later claimed to have invented (Courrèges disputed this), was the defining garment of the 1960s, and it came out of a retail concept that was the antithesis of everything Paris stood for: fast, cheap, youth-targeted, ready-to-wear.

London in the 1960s became, for the first time in a century, a fashion capital in its own right — Vogue editor Diana Vreeland's "Youthquake," the boutiques of Carnaby Street, the Beatles and their Tommy Nutter suits. The decade ended with the economic shock of the 1970s, but the formula had been proved: London could set the international agenda.

Punk and the St Martins Generation

The 1976 punk explosion was the most complete British fashion revolution since the mini. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, at the Chelsea shop they had renamed SEX, produced a wardrobe — bondage trousers, ripped T-shirts, the Anarchy shirt — that was explicitly anti-luxury, anti-haute couture, and anti-good taste. By 1980 its motifs had been absorbed into mainstream fashion at every price point. Punk remains the most-quoted British movement and the most globally exported.

The 1990s added a second export: the Central Saint Martins MA, which produced Alexander McQueen (1992), John Galliano (1984), Stella McCartney (1995), Hussein Chalayan (1993), and many of the next two decades' most influential designers. McQueen in particular — Highland Rape (1995), Voss (2001), Plato's Atlantis (2010) — redefined what a fashion show could be. The contemporary British establishment (Jonathan Anderson at Loewe, Phoebe Philo relaunched, Simone Rocha, Grace Wales Bonner) is largely the St Martins generation, grown up.

The Contemporary Moment

British fashion in the 2020s is still operating on two tracks. The heritage brands — Burberry, Barbour, Mulberry, Paul Smith — sell a version of Britishness that is essentially Edwardian: the trench, the waxed jacket, the tweed. The conceptual London houses — Simone Rocha, Molly Goddard, Grace Wales Bonner, Priya Ahluwalia — sell a version that is global, post-colonial, and almost entirely new.

What unites the two, as it always has, is a national confidence in clothing as a language. In few other countries does an eighteen-year-old care as much what they wear. It is the substrate on which both the Row and the St Martins BA rest.