Chic trend
Jamaican designer Jessica Ogden received excellent reviews during London’s Fashion week. An email to Saint International’s Dweight Peters ensured a Jamaican presence and Jamaican models Gabrielle Tennent and Margo Morrison were part of the fashion ensemble. Below is how British Vogue described Jessica’s presentation. Clearly now Jamaica’s most successful international designer, Jessica through her designs harks back to the romantic, softer years.
Famed for her love of old quilts, aprons and deliberately bodged and patched hand-knits, Ogden first pioneered the whole salvage chic trend that designers squeezed dry a few seasons ago.
She revels in the intimacy of old fabrics – and this season was no different, as patched quilts and damaged cottons were given her blessing in a presentation in Soho’s Chapel of Saint Barnabas, in an alcove where an altar would normally be.
Her respect for worn antique fabrics has something of a religious faith about it. So fervent is she to keep the character of the cloth that a tattered silk petticoat is lovingly fixed back onto a skirt in pieces, clearly showing the moth-eaten state it was discovered in. There is what Gosford Park characters would call a “below stairs” feeling about the clothes with the sort of smock dresses and distressed uniform-style pieces you might see servants wearing as they scuttled around in the bowels of Robert Altman’s reconstructed country house.
However, in Ogden’s studio, workers win credit for their painstaking handiwork. The designer highlights her assistants’ labours by naming pieces after their makers. We know Maureen made the antique patch skirt; Sara, the belted knit vest; and Charlotte, a black party frock decorated with thin golden threads – caring sentiment from this designer whose work is all about love and longevity.
