by Sarah Mower

Photo: Courtesy of Louise Gray

SEE THE SLIDESHOW

Louise Gray, London’s most playful renegade New Generation designer, has been inundated with letters and e-mails from tweenagers and even younger girl-fans who’ve found out where she works, and are clamoring to go to her show on saturday. “One of them was nine years old!” she says with a laugh. “I had to call her dad to make sure it was okay. He said he’d love for her to go!” What makes Gray a girl-magnet is her cheerfully spontaneous, arty, always colorful creativity—as you can see here from the nutty cartoons of her new collection, “Up Your Look,” that she drew for us. It’s endearing fashion to make you smile, though never so cutesy as to be completely junior. Testament to that are the images plastered on her wall: pictures of the tartan-wearing Bay City Rollers, Scottish teen idols of the seventies, and street pictures from New York in the eighties—and lots and lots of dots. In other words, she’s been early onto trends which are also circulating in the upper atmosphere of fashion, but she’s led the way there completely by her own instinct. The spots, which she was messing around with last summer in the form of flourescent stationery stickers, are now turning up translated into prints—and dabbed all over jazzy boots by Pollini, which have to be seen to be believed.

2 years ago  |  94 notes

#Vogue#Fashion Week#Preview#Louise Gray#Fall 2011