AARON ESH SS27 - LAWS OF ATTRACTION

I have been thinking about attraction. Not romance particularly, but that strange pull towards something before you have decided whether you like it. The thing that makes you look twice. It is rarely about perfection. Usually, there is something else going on.

SS27 feels electric. The colours are bright, almost aggressively so. They collide rather than coordinate: unexpected shades sitting beside one another, things that shouldn’t belong together somehow making perfect sense. There is a feeling of excess without being excessive. Young, but not innocent. Beautiful, but with something slightly strange about it.

The clothes themselves feel very resolved; the tension comes from the chemistry between them. A hoodie with a fluffy organza skirt - something ordinary against something special. Organza is dyed, cut into strips, hand-brushed and embroidered back together to create shearling. Ribs are high and disproportionate; nude leather is treated by hand to look sickly. Tailoring and trench coats are floppy and soft, with sharp collars in a colour that feels almost wrong. Familiar clothes are pushed into unfamiliar combinations. The pleasure is in finding the balance.

I have always been interested in the point where taste becomes personal. When something is technically wrong but instinctively right. When you see someone wearing a combination you would never have imagined and immediately want to wear it. It is no longer about following rules. It is about instinct.

There is something particular about being young and trying to work yourself out. Wanting to look older, then younger. Wanting to be noticed, then pretending you don’t. The bravado and the softness existing at the same time. The desire to appear certain while everything is actually changing.

“A boy is a boy for only a very brief space.”

Perhaps that is where some of the energy comes from. That short period when everything feels heightened: clothes, sex, music, friendship, boredom. A bad decision can feel like the most important decision you have ever made. A look across a room can stay with you for years. You are constantly becoming someone slightly different without quite noticing it.

My own life has changed in much the same way this year. One thing led to another, then another, and suddenly the landscape looked completely different. You only recognise the butterfly effect afterwards. At the time, you are simply moving through your life, making small decisions without knowing what they will set in motion.

That stayed with me while making the collection. A small change can alter the whole feeling: a colour beside another colour, a different proportion, a flash of skin, a familiar garment worn in an unfamiliar way.

The clothes carry that same energy. Young, hungry, slightly awkward, slightly vain, occasionally ridiculous. Wanting to be noticed but not wanting to admit it. Getting dressed for yourself while knowing someone else is looking.

Things don’t need to match. They need to attract.

And perhaps the things that attract us most are the things we were never supposed to put together in the first place.

- Aaron Esh