In a way, the 1930s ballroom at the Dorchester Hotel stands for every traditional ballroom in every super-luxury hotel in every city: venues for happy family celebrations, weddings, receptions, anniversaries, award ceremonies, what-have-you the world over. It was the perfect place for Richard Quinn to make his point about how his business has grown—quite hugely—to embrace women who come in need of formal, outrageously glamorous dresses.
“The collection was really about the art of event dressing,” he said, “but also associating memory with clothes. So this was really about creating clothes that people will cherish over time. Being entrusted to make people’s wedding dresses is an amazing thing for me, for us.”
The grandeur of the preshow scene was an event in itself—a party packed with Quinn’s international clientele, all a-sparkle in their poufs and ruffles and oversized flower prints. Quinn, always the host with the very most of London fashion, can never do things by halves: Before he dressed the show, he dressed the ballroom. An intense bank of white hydrangeas and orchids by Philip Hammond flanked the runway. Chandeliers glittered against the black-draped room. And behind the audience was positioned the English Chamber Orchestra and Choir, ready to perform soaringly emotional classical adaptations of songs with a personal meaning for the designer.
Summer seasons are about weddings, of course. What the haute couture has always done in Paris, Quinn is now also doing from his headquarters in Bermondsey, South London. “This is about crafted dresses, everything is made by us in London. We’re in London, but we look to the world,” he said.
The cult of Quinn has spread by word of mouth at wedding parties in Middle Eastern countries in particular. The spectacular beading he applies is designed at his studio and embroidered in India (as all European and American luxury houses do). He showed 10 bridal dresses in long silhouettes, with at least five short white ones for choice. Bevies of bridesmaids could be imagined, mothers, aunts, and grandmothers of brides.
His repertoire of silhouettes is more or less the same as what it was when he was a Central Saint Martins student obsessed with the golden years of mid-20th-century couture. No one could have guessed back then that Richard Quinn, a working-class boy, was dreaming so big: to set up a house of his own, let alone do it. It means that Quinn is offering a shape for everyone to suit herself—a way to stand out within the guardrails of socially accepted formality.
And to judge from the laughter and cheers of the clients who surrounded him backstage, he’s a designer who makes the whole process a lot of fun. And that’s an important ingredient too.