Steve O’Smith won the Karl Lagerfeld Award at last year’s LVMH Prize. It could hardly have been a happier fit for a memorial gift to a young designer, founded by Delphine Arnault in the great master’s name. Lagerfeld was a prolific sketcher, and Smith’s own fluid drawings are at the heart of his work.
Smith showed what he’s been able to achieve with money this season, making his living illustrations forever closer to haute couture. In terms of inspiration, his starting points were “looking at Otto Dix, Edward Burra and Madeleine Vionnet,” he said. Dix depicted the decadent underbelly of post-World War I Berlin, a British artist Bora painted Harlem nightlife at the same time, while Vionnet was inventing prejudice in Paris.
The juxtaposition of these influences – “they were in the late 1920s” – sent Smith on a spree in his painting, character sketches with loose interpretations of flapper dresses and delicately biased slip dresses, as well as impressions of waiters, soldiers, barfries.
What is new here is that this was the first time Smith added color to his black-and-white register. Its reds, pinks on peaches, and flecks of brown were achieved with layers of hand-dyed tulle, the lines are cut-outs applied to organza, and where Smith’s illustrations suggest freehand bows, they are minutely carved.
From his first season, just two years ago, Smith magnetized people willing to commission and wait for his art/fashion pieces. “Loyal customers keep coming back,” he noted. In his interview for the LVMH prize, he called for the cash to be spent on building a specialist team in London, so he could further develop his technique. “So now we’ve assembled this team—an amazing cutter, embroiderer and sewer. They all come from a couture background,” she laughs, “and now we’re in a studio that’s not my living room. So it’s huge.”
What next? Slow fashion, carefully crafted for private clients, is the perfect niche and business model for this young designer in a difficult time for the wider industry. Being careful with money is also a virtue — a discipline born into a generation that has grown up with resourcefulness through pandemics. “I’m ringing up the LVMH money, so I don’t spend it all at once,” Smith said. So far, he is working on lookbooks and private client appointments in London and Paris. Still: The beauty of Steve O’Smith’s clothes is their 3D-ness. The gentle bounce of the poufs, the flapping of the gods, and how wildly that red-shaded jacket moves. One day soon, he really should.
