In 2023, Christopher Kane did what no independent designer ever wants to do. He closed the label he had spent 17 years building with his sister, Tammy Kane. This was the man who put rubberised lace on the runway, who cut up saddle leather on a domestic sewing machine, and who found his ideas in the least obvious places. This Sunday, Kane returns to London Fashion Week as Mulberry’s creative director of womenswear. It's an unlikely pairing. Mulberry means Somerset leather, country houses and the bags everyone remembers from the brand’s buzzy Alexa Chung years. Kane’s world has always been more subversive: Catholic school uniforms, the strong women who raised him in Motherwell and the "bad, cool girls" who have run through his work for two decades. But Mulberry needs something new. Two years ago, it was fending off a takeover bid, cutting nearly a quarter of its corporate roles and seeing sales slide. Under chief executive Andrea Baldo, Mulberry is rebuilding itself around Britishness and craft, and there are early signs it's working. Sales rose 23 percent in the first quarter of this financial year. Kane’s first fashion show is the next and most visible test of that strategy. He sees the job as an extension of his idiosyncratic design sensibilities. A few days before the show, Kane sat down with BoF's editor-at-large, Tim Blanks, who has followed his work since the beginning. They talk about the axe in his Instagram teasers and what his years away from fashion has taught him. Key Insights: Pruning your work as a design philosophy: Kane has been posting images of an axe chopping a tree ahead of the show — a reference, he says, to arboriculture and to his own process. "I have been editing heavily and pruning, as you would say, to fine-tune this really clear message, but also having a blade-like precision," he says. "I think I've learned over 20 years in the business, of really having a heavy edit and just always trying to be precise." Mulberry’s mix of Britishness: Mulberry was never a status bag where Kane grew up; it was a football casual brand. Long before Alexa Chung and the brand's golden moment, Kane knew Mulberry as one label among many worn by football casuals in Motherwell. "Mulberry was definitely present when I was growing up, but it wasn't the obvious bag," he says. "It was the rugby shirt or the football T-shirt" — worn alongside labels like Burberry as "an amalgamation of street culture, youth culture." A failed business teaches you things a successful one never will: Kane is candid about what the two years since his label's closure gave him. "That time off really gave me perspective into what I really wanted in life," he says. "The highs are there, but they're very short-lived. And the lows are there, and they're also short-lived." He's blunt, too, about an industry that rarely acknowledges its casualties: "No one ever sees that, what designers and creatives go through, because it's a tough game, but for some reason we're truly addicted to it and we love it." Every collection is autobiography: Kane says the Mulberry collection carries the same personal references that defined his own work — Catholic school uniforms, the "bad, cool girls" of his Motherwell childhood, the women in his family who raised him. "Every collection I've done has always been a bit of an autobiographical look to my life or my childhood," he says. Additional Resources: Is London Fashion Week Back in Action? | BoFChristopher Kane Joins Mulberry to Power Ready-to-Wear Relaunch | BoFMulberry Quarterly Sales Jump 23% as Turnaround Gathers Pace | BoF Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
