Mood board: Alongside a flair for flouncy shapes and subversively sugary shades, fabrication and technique, including painstaking hand smocking, has always been essential to Molly Goddard’s design output. The mille feuille-like layers of her tulle dresses have the power to float and bob weightlessly down the runway like clouds. A dress in her last A/W 2019 collection was formed from 90m of tulle. Goddard spent six months working on new forms of cutting and construction for her S/S 2020 show, ensuring that the hyperbolic pieces in her collection – from puffball pastel yellow frilled tulle skirts to transparent peach melba toned ruffled dresses – stayed supported without internal tricks. Silhouettes were ruched and ruffled, puffed and layered, secured with ribbon ties and smattered with whimsical floral prints and imagined in bold corals, cobalt, peach and lime.
Scene setting: The lightness of the collection was reflected in the show’s light filled, expansive venue. It was held inside Marylebone’s Seymour Leisure Centre, a space with an enormous sports hall boasting a window lined elliptical ceiling. It is built on the same site as the first version of a public swimming pool in England.
Finishing touches: Goddard’s brand is only four years old, and in recent season’s she’s been gently dipping her toe into the accessories category. For S/S 2020 she added a series of studded leather shoulder bags to her repertoire, bright leather boots and dainty summer sandals with a single ankle strap. §
