THERE IS something particularly adolescent about attraction. I am not talking about romance necessarily, but that strange, involuntary pull toward something before taste has had a chance to intervene. You look twice. You wonder why. Perhaps it is beautiful; perhaps it’s really not. Aaron Esh’s Spring/ Summer 2027 collection, Laws of Attraction, lives in that uncertainty.
For Esh, who has spent the past few seasons establishing a recognisable language of louche tailoring, leather, London nightlife and a certain grubby glamour, SS27 feels like a loosening of the rules. The clothes are familiar, but their relationships are not. A hoodie meets a fluffy organza skirt; a grey zip-up jacket sits beneath a shocking-pink feathered mini skirt; soft tailoring is interrupted by colour that feels almost chemically wrong. Things don’t match. They attract.
Colour is the most obvious departure. Esh, previously inclined towards a darker palette, lets loose with crimson, electric blue, turquoise, purple and an almost bilious yellow-beige, with a shocking pink opening the show, switching the change on like a flashbulb. The combinations are deliberately discordant, recalling the reckless colour-blocking of another youth culture while feeling entirely his own. The effect is electric.
That strangeness is also where the collection’s sensuality lies. Nude leather is treated to look almost sickly; ribs are pushed high and out of proportion; trenches and tailoring are soft and floppy, their collars sharpened into unlikely colours. There are tiny jackets with big trousers, fluid dresses and cropped, body-conscious pieces. The clothes suggest the awkward vanity of being young: wanting to be noticed, then immediately pretending you don’t care and wanting to hide.
That tension is what makes the collection work. Esh has spent the last year refining his world, and now he seems less interested in proving what it is than in seeing how far it can stretch. At Camden’s Electric Ballroom, with the music turned up to an appropriately punishing volume, the clothes felt fast, sexy and slightly off-kilter.
“A boy is a boy for only a very brief space,” Esh personally writes in his show notes. Perhaps attraction works similarly. The things that stay with us are rarely the ones that behaved themselves.
by Imogen Clark