http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/21/fashion/london-fashion-week-j-w-anderson-christopher-kane.html 2016-09-20 16:10:15 Fashioning a Post-‘Brexit’ World Collections by Jonathan Anderson, Simone Rocha, Christopher Kane and others reflected the uncertainty about how Britain, and its designers, now move forward. === LONDON — Uncertainty and insecurity, rents in the social fabric — such atmospheric currents have a creeping, potent influence on the creative mind. (Actually, to be fair, on every mind, but you can see it more easily with creatives.) They can send some imaginations searching for escape, real and fantastic. They can drive others to buckle down and gird up. They can force value systems into brilliant focus and prompt a palpable yearning for times past. They can inspire brilliant leaps of faith, or retreats into the trite. What they cannot do is be ignored. Or so was apparent during “I felt like doing something practical,” said So her signature broderie anglaise was grounded in vinyl and knotted down one side, nude tulle covered in peonies, heavy taffeta remade as a trench, and big shoulder bags slung across the body. If the angelic host needed outfits for working the fields at harvest time, this collection would be the answer. Indeed, the Women’s Land Army, the no-nonsense British home force during the world wars, has been something of a muse of the week. Christopher Kane And Johnny Coca at If these brands had their Wellie boots (in Ms. Rocha’s case) and Crocs (in Mr. Kane’s) firmly planted on the ground, however, at It left a lingering, if sometimes synthetic, sense of far, far away — though the symbolism of a big yellow sun on a striped spaghetti-strap knit that, instead of smiling, was dripping a crystal tear, was impossible to ignore. Just as the narration that provided the soundtrack to Taken from the documentary “The Continuous Music Man” about Lubomyr Melnyk, a Ukrainian-Canadian pianist, it went, in part, “The music drowns out the stupidity of modern society, lets the inner soul flower and gather strength.” Well, O.K. then. In art, there is escape, not to mention metaphor, as They called up more complex emotions, in any case, than And so it went. Maybe it seems like this is reading too much into the asides and ideas, but “Brexit” and its repercussions have been pretty much the dominant narrative since the summer, when all these collections began to coalesce. How do you disaggregate the two? The one goes to the heart of national identity, and identity is the essence of fashion. Clothes do not exist free of context. All roads, and seams, lead to the same place. Witness Jonathan Anderson’s “The question, really,” Mr. Anderson said back in his atelier after the show, “is how do you combine things?” He’s not the only one who should be asking. But at least he had, if not actually an answer, a suggestion for how to begin (his answer was a work in progress or, as he called it, “an endless conversation”). You try a bit of this, you try a bit of that, and “whatever you put out there, you learn from it.” He was talking about his show. Kind of.