London Collections: Men
- An Overview by George Reece
There’s no use pretending it doesn’t –
180 The Strand looks like a building
site. It’s partly because of the
Foto: Zander
temporary partitions that have been
put up to divide and give some
structure to the huge open lobby. They
look like the kinds of boards the
council put up around Tottenham
Court Road tube station when they’re
excavating the entire thing to put in a
new escalator, probably because that’s
more or less what they are. I half
expected to see a sheet of A4 paper
with the site manager’s phone number
on it in Helvetica Bold. But the other
part of the reason the new hub of the
BFC’s London Menswear show looks
like a building site is that it was
designed that way.
It’s an absolutely awful building. It
hasn’t even got the gumption to be
properly ugly. It’s just weakly concreteish in the same way a thousand blocks
of flats are up and down the country
(for better or worse). And the inside is
unapologetically bleak. It has all the
warmth of a gothic cathedral with none
of the challenging, aggressive beauty.
The photographer’s entrance is
through a strange, completely bare
ante-room with exposed air
conditioning ducts; bits of old foam
and tin-foil hanging from an
oppressively low ceiling. And the
display areas are nondescript to say
the least. It’s like a white wall gallery
with grey walls. And a strangely shiny
floor.
Sleeves Magazine