There’s just over three weeks until the festival gates open, which will see the brightest emerging talents and the stalwarts of the fashion industry alike descend upon the Walled Garden and decamp to create the Wardrobe Department and Theatre of Fashion.
Summer at Port Eliot Festival sees a mass-migration of fashion talent to the ancient walled garden on the estate as Sarah Mower, the British Fashion Council’s Ambassador for Emerging Talent, assembles an unthinkably glorious and gifted group of Britain’sforemost designers, to create clothes, accessories and make up for the Port Eliot audience.
This year, our fashion line-up is set to take the levels of creativity to unheralded new heights, with a brand new stage for 2016 adding another dimension to the delights in store.
This year we are thrilled to welcome Paris fashion maison Chloé, and its creative director Clare Waight Keller for a talk about Chloé’s feminist spirit, complete with a show, exhibition and a very special guest.
We’ll be celebrating fashion’s obsession with the 1980s by staging the ultimate flash-back: a fashion-crash of wild London street style, Dynasty glitz, political fashion, Sloane Rangers, Wag-Club kids and Buffalo boys. Don your giant slogan tees and ruffle your ra-ra skirts for a disco-inspired Saturday afternoon, where we’ll be casting festival-goers for our annual fashion show complete with Eighties-styled hair and makeup courtesy of M•A•C and Bumble and bumble.
Our inaugural Wardrobe Department shop will open for business. Run by Paul Smith volunteers, ‘Special Special’ will be stocked to the brim with exclusively designed products by London’s most celebrated emerging designers, including Ed Marler, Matty Bovan, Rottingdean Bazaar, Claire Barrow, Sadie Williams, Daniel Fletcher and Ellie Mac Embroidery. Donations from Comme des Garcons Good Design Shop, Katharine Hamnett for YMC and Marques Almeida will raise funds for the British Fashion Council Education Foundation.
There’ll be more opportunities than ever before to get involved: Molly Goddard returns with her immensely popular fashion art class; the Pencil Atelier is back with Jenny Dyson and her merry gang of incredible seamstresses and makers providing daily workshops of wearable wonder; and Barbara Hulanicki will host her famous Tweenie Fashionista University; Milliner extraordinaire Stephen Jones and the Multi-Oscar winning costume designer Sandy Powell will be providing inimitable masterclasses of hands-on making sessions.
We’ll also be welcoming back a whole host of our Wardrobe Department favourites. Click HERE to discover the fashion line-up in full.
