“Men can be beautiful, delicate and chic. I want to honour the men that I love in my life.” – Lottie Robinson
This past season – perhaps more than others – the sentiment of women dressing women was tangible; think Chemena Kamali’s debut at Chloé. All of which make Robinson’s rationale behind menswear more intriguing. “Being a bit removed from it helps me understand the design better. Designing for someone that I don’t personally resonate with makes me more creative,” she says. Through this process, the ‘characters’ that she designs for come out of the woodwork. “Men can be beautiful, delicate and chic. I want to honour the men that I love in my life,” she says. “Looking at these characters, I love highlighting who they are through their clothes, their life and their history.” The designer honed these emotions, sharpening them into tactile tailoring on the BA Fashion Design at Westminster. “It was about learning the rules to break them uni,” she says, alluding to the practical training as well as fashion history.
“I got a new desire for workwear from Craig Green,.” – Lottie Robinson
“I got a new desire for workwear from Craig Green,” she says. “They love interesting fabrications and fabric sprayed with rubber and tin foil; it was very artistic.” Workwear was a key component of The Fine, Robinson’s graduate collection named after her late grandfather’s sailboat. “I loved who he was and I wanted to depict where he came from,” she says. The collection’s namesake was “a little small wooden, nothing grand, sailboat. Cute, honest. His surname, Gowan, which is my surname, means son of a blacksmith.” The designer patchworked a portrait of her grandfather by fusing elements of workwear with 80s tailoring, informed by his time studying philosophy, then as a careers officer. “I wanted to stick to organic fabrics,” she says. “I wanted to use pinstripe to reference office tailored attire, but also to really accentuate where things have been pulled and twisted; fastened and stretched against the clean-cut tailoring norms.”