Giles

LONDON, September 16, 2008
By Sarah Mower
Is Giles Deacon getting a bit sensible? Put aside the giant pink Pac-Man figure squatting at the end of the runway for a minute—what he actually sent out was not one of his excursions into extreme whimsy but a collection of sheath dresses, the shape that's currently winning the popular vote among grown-up women everywhere.

Of course, this being Deacon, you wouldn't expect them to be delivered straight up and down without any tweaks of craftsmanship—or without skewering some insider pop culture references. Deacon declared those afterward. "I was just looking at the graphic designers of the late eighties and early nineties who I grew up admiring: Ben Kelly, Peter Saville, Mark Farrow. Pet Shop Boys videos, The Hacienda club. What they did was ridiculously simple but incredibly graphic." Pac-Man (the precursor of every modern computer game) dates from the same sort of vintage.

True enough, there were prints (giant allover camouflages and smudged polka dots), but Deacon kept them mostly to trimmings, or removed them altogether in a series of solid-color double-knit jersey dresses. And he endeared himself to his potential customers by using a broadened age group of models, including Emma Balfour, Elise Crombez, Liberty Ross, and Christina Kruse. He even popped in western shirts and a single pair of jeans, coming out soon as a collaboration with Lee Cooper.