A First Look At John Alexander Skelton’s Collection XI

Today, John Alexander Skelton releases his Spring/Summer 2022 collection, captured through film and stills in the designer’s native North Yorkshire. Skelton frequently utilises recycled fabrics such as antique bed sheets and old grain sacks, often found in markets, customising these materials through hand-dying, over-washing, painting and patching techniques. This season, owing to the constraints of the pandemic, which required the markets that normally supply his antique linens to shutter, the designer also developed hand spun and hand woven organic cottons with mills in Ireland.

The London-based designer’s latest offering revisits many similar shapes found in his winter collection, in part inspired by English poet Ted Hughes, a fellow Yorkshireman. Skelton’s previous collections have been influenced by themes as diverse as the cotton trade between India and Britain in the 1930s to traditional British 19th-century folk theatre and medieval pagan rituals. His tailoring evokes deconstructed versions of 19th-century menswear such as voluminous frock coats and high-waisted trousers.

Skelton tells Something Curated that the latest collection links to his childhood memories of growing up in Yorkshire. Collaborating with a breadth of creatives from milliner Stephen Jones on hats, footwear brand Matthias Winkler for shoes, illustrator Emi Maggi on print design, and basket-weaving specialist Rachel Frost for bags, the new collection celebrates craft in all forms. Working with natural dyes, such as indigo, this season also sees a restrained injection of colour appear.

Following on from the documentation of last season in Yorkshire, this collection has been shot in the same location by London-based Spanish filmmaker Rei Nadal. Nadal’s approach to filmmaking has its roots in literary techniques that she adapts to create visual stories, as well as combining fashion photography references with philosophy and ideologies in order to create experimental films which merge genres. The corresponding lookbook has been captured by photographer Oscar Foster-Kane.



Feature image: Photography by Oscar Foster-Kane / Courtesy John Alexander Skelton