Courtesy of John Alexander Skelton / Lonny Spence
The haunting, ethereal wails of This Mortal Coil swirled through the halls of St. Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest parish church, on Tuesday night. Air heavy with clouds of incense, it was a fittingly striking off-schedule return to the runway for John Alexander Skelton, who hasn’t held a live show since 2022.
Yet, unlike past seasons—when collections were steeped in narratives from British folk history—Skelton said he took inspiration from the gothic aesthetic and intangible emotions that This Mortal Coil, an ’80s dream pop collective, elicited.
“It’s my emotional response to [the music]. I wanted to be a lot less specific so I had the freedom to create the exact collection that I wanted to create without having to be bound within something,” Skelton said.
That took shape in romantic longline coats, tailored suiting, knitwear and shirting, with Skelton’s signature horn buttons dotted throughout, and sported by models clutching lit candles in hand; in totality, a chic ode to days of yore.
Inky blacks composed the majority of this season’s palette, a choice Skelton attributed to examining 15th-century portraiture in which wearing black was “generally thought of as a power symbol,” he explained.
While sable stole the spotlight, it was certainly never monotonous, the color transformed by an array of textiles (Yorkshire wools, tweeds, and linens), Dickensian silhouettes, and accessorized with delicate golden circlets, pendants, and earrings made by jeweler and frequent collaborator Slim Barrett.
Brighter hues stood out in the collection like rare jewels: deep amethyst wide-leg silk jacquard pants paired with a woolen cutaway coat in an even deeper tone, and a silken emerald ascot tucked into black separates.
Closing the show was the most hypnotic shade of all, a blood-red ruby, which took the form of a waxed cotton coat featuring a box-pleated back and a belt cinched around the waist.
It was a mesmerizing conclusion that echoed This Mortal Coil’s own: the collective retired after releasing its 1991 record “Blood.”
