Don't ignore the classmates!

The year 2006 when Christopher Kane graduated from Central St. Martins MA was a particularly good one giving us a crop of designers to look out for. Since then, of course we all know what has happened to Christopher Kane but I have been eager to see what the likes of Lisa Pritchard or Molly Grad has been up to and thus far, nothing has surfaced to my knowledge. However, after closer investigation, Marcel Ostertag, who graduated with a first prize for his menswear collection at CSM in the same year as Kane, has gone onto great things. Things that I hadn't a clue about which just goes to show how insular conceptions of fashion can be, so lesson one would be to get out of the London-bubble. For a start, Ostertag has now gone onto womenswear. Lesson two, pay more bloody attention to menswear in the first place (I have a few choice words to say about the menswear shows AW08-9 shows which have just about ended...). He also shows regularly at Berlin Fashion Week and now has two stores to his name, one in Vienna and one in Munich, an achievement that London-based designers would struggle to achieve given how hard it is to keep the finances in order. Lesson three, pay more attention to ALL the fashion weeks.

Marcel started off by fusing masculine and feminine within his menswear collections and so he has done the same thing with his womenswear. Crisp and clean is a good description of his style but those two words seem all too simplistic for the actual results. He seems to have exacted the science of colour, fabric and pattern choice and then applied his sharp tailoring to those choices to get a collection that is both impactful and understated at the same time. The recognisable and classical features of trench and shirts are there but moulded to suit Ostertag's needs and way of cutting.