John Alexander Skelton might make wonderfully alluring clothes, but he’s also a masterful storyteller. The images from his latest lookbook spin an escapist yarn of a balmy summer in Ireland’s County Mayo, where fisherman drag up their nets or gaze wistfully out to the sea, and villagers hike to a nearby waterfall and pluck wildflowers from the meadow, before gathering to sip a pint of Guinness in a local pub. Where Skelton has often found himself fascinated with a certain strain of moody Victoriana, this time around, it seems he’s letting the light in a little.
“That part of Ireland, there’s a softness to it,” Skelton told me at a preview, noting that he has family roots in that corner of the Emerald Isle and that the lookbook is a quietly nostalgic tribute to family holidays he would take there in the ’90s. “The mountains are not as big, and everything’s extremely verdant and green, and the people are very welcoming. I wanted the collection to have a softness and a lightness to it as well.” Rather than pre-planning the casting, Skelton and photographer William Waterworth worked with a local intermediary who helped them scout along the way (they looked for “a real range of people, farmers, fishermen, a couple of guys that were just retired—we even stopped someone who was passing by on a bike,” Skelton laughed), and the result is a palpable feeling that the clothing—even with its deep relationship to history—is grounded in a contemporary reality.
That sense of “softness and lightness” shone through in some of the collection’s more playful details, such as a white linen double-breasted suit featuring a light cinch at the waist with the opening of the jacket fanning out across the waist, or an especially lovely dark green waxed jacket with a double row of buttons down the front. And it was equally visible in the slightly earthy color story of off-whites and pinks, expressed most vividly in a series of looks cut from a ditzy floral print. Anyone who has seen Skelton himself knows that he’s a living embodiment of his brand, and the collection, he noted, was borne out of thinking more deeply about the relationship between his own wardrobe and that of his customer. “I really just wanted to make exactly what I felt like wearing at the time,” he said.
In particular, Skelton wanted to reiterate his commitment to the off-kilter formality that underpins his design ethos, in part as an act of resistance to the slow but steady rise of casual wear in recent years. “There’s just something about it that I really dislike, and it makes me want to do the complete opposite and wear something that’s really crazily formal—and not necessarily polished,” he said. “In fact, something that’s completely the opposite of that. And it seems to kind of evoke quite a strong reaction in people. But I kind of quite enjoy that.”
The collection—and the ravishing lookbook that accompanies it—is a testament to the kind of fashion alchemy that can only happen by going out into the world and engaging with real people, and allowing that to feed back into the clothes. “One thing that I don’t really like about my job is that I don’t get to travel that much with it,” Skelton said, with a smile. “Traveling for these shoots is quite a nice way to get out into the world, rather than being in the studio all the time.” That boundless curiosity is exactly what lends Skelton’s clothes their curious magic.