Surrounded by Shrouded Scarecrows, John Alexander Skelton’s ‘Otherworld’ Unfolds

It’s dark and I’m watching my breath dance in January’s cold air. I’m sitting on the stone steps outside South London’s Asylum Chapel, watching people with flushed cheeks exchange smiles and hellos and go on in through a large open door. Inside, the chapel hall glows warmly with twinkling candlelight and cups steaming with hot mulled cider. Chairs are set across the stone floor in a circle, in the middle of which stands a small stage holding a spotlight. Lining the room are scarecrows, each enveloped in tall white drapes. John Alexander Skelton Collection XX is titled Otherworld, a name that, in this moment, feels full of promise.

John Skelton has carved out a place as Britain’s prophet of folkloric fashion. Eschewing the rigid tempo of fashion week, the Yorkshire-born designer introduces his worlds on his own terms – staging wondrous, off-kilter performances where clothing is not just presented but enacted, and where the audience, at times, become part of the act.

Otherworld took its shape from a single image: a Brigantian horned Celtic god harness fitting found in Aldborough, North Yorkshire. Skelton, whose work is rooted in established research and interest in Neolithic British culture, explained that the object’s certain ‘magical’ presence reminded him of Cernunnos, a horned Celtic deity understood as a mediator between the civilised and the wild. This in-between figure became the character behind the collection, bringing the idea of mediation, so central to Celtic mythology, to Skelton’s characters and their performance in the show.

Skelton’s process and research led him to Samhain, the Celtic festival marking the end of the year and the onset of winter, a moment when the boundary between the living and the dead is believed to thin. Although midwinter had passed, the presentation of Otherworld felt like a type of ritual and festivity that marks this point in the year.

Once the first model, a brutish, three-headed character, took his place on the stage, he began to bang a drum, and the show began. Beneath a cracked white papier-mâché mask, a second character moved around the hall reciting muffled poetry. These sounds – one character’s rhythmic drumming layered with another’s distinctive prose – ran through the quiet crowd like a ritual, all of us sort of beautifully spellbound.

Otherworldliness was felt throughout the show. The spotlight followed Skelton’s poet as he slowly danced, theatrically pulling the drapes to reveal each look one by one. Models were replaced by scarecrow-like forms – these uncanny, human-adjacent silhouettes, suspended between the living world and an imagined otherworld. There was something both unsettling and strangely tender about them. Their hodgepodge construction was influenced by the British countryside as documented in Colin Garrett’s photo book Scarecrows, where figures veer from sinister to elegant to purely functional.

Skelton embraced this kind of deliberate disorder in the styling of the collection; sleeves heavy with cloth, shoulders burdened, hems raw and uneven. It was like seeing the British countryside at dusk – these familiar figures stationed in fields, rigid and still, while their clothes blow and whip around their frames in the wind.

Colours felt aligned with nature’s own finer details – rustic browns, auburns, and dark ebonies. These natural tones, Skelton explains, are obtained from plant dyes: woads for blues, various berries for purples, and hints of bronze reminiscent of jewellery in jacquards and shirting. Some wools, linens and knits were left undyed, coloured like wood or sand. Heavy tweeds from mills across the British Isles were finished with Skelton’s signature black buttons, fastened jauntily to show off the rough textures, layers and fastenings that define Skelton’s work.

And then the drumming stopped, as did the poetry. Overhead lights were flicked on, breaking us from our trance and flooding the room with light, which was quickly followed by ardent whoops and cheers. The hall, now starkly lit, was strewn with discarded white drapes and the buzz of excited chatter. Not our cue to leave; in fact, an otherworldly opportunity to look closer. Beautiful bronze brooches and serpent-like clasps, made in collaboration with Slim Barrett, punctuated layers of coats and shirts, whilst Celtic decorative motifs surfaced quietly in silk and wool jacquards. Crowning many of the looks were hats hand-felted by Skelton’s long-term collaborator, Rachel Frost, shaped like Celtic helmets or the horned head of the Brigantian deity.

In the end, Otherworld was not a pretend place, but an experience vividly felt. When the lights came up and the spell was broken, the chapel became, once again, a room, a floor, a happy crowd in winter coats. Still, Skelton’s clothes held on to their magic.



Feature image: John Alexander Skelton Collection XX: Otherworld. Photography by William Waterworth