WHO: Jacob Kimmie

WHERE: Vauxhall Fashion Scout @ Freemasons’ Hall

FRONT ROW: Fabulous drag queens with blow-up doll lips, midas touch mammoth crucifix necklaces, and huge blonde beehives decorated with jeweled tiaras. Also, The Artist – formerly known as Prince’s – identical twin,wearing huge plumes of feathers as a collar.

WHAT: Protesting against the banality of mainstream ideology and celebrating radical philosophy, the self-proclaimed saviour of British fashion cemented his reputation as a creative genius in a fearless approach to the future with gothic sacred themes. Finding its breath in Peter Hugo’s “Hyena Men,” Leon Bonnat’s Martydom of St. Denis, Robert Mapplethorpe’s White Gauze and the eroticism of The Borghese Hermaphrodite, Kimmie’s “Martyr” collection was never going to be for fashion’s faint-hearted. In a church-like milieu, with organ tones and Notre Dame chimes timing us in for the opening, near-naked men lay on platform blocks as models entered through wrought gates in monochromatic prints and damp-blue denims with rope and ribbon details evoking incarceration. Renowned for being simultaneously sentimental and subversive, the collection was as aggressive as it was romantic, with barbed wire-like thorns running parallel to satins and draped tulles.

HIGHLIGHT: A tie between the male models coming out in midriff-baring shrunken jackets and “Pretty Woman” patent thigh-highs, and the flood of press, buyers and onlookers alike swarming the catwalk to take pictures when they realised the models were staying put after the show had ended.

QUOTES: Pained cockney in a trench and rolled-up denims sarcastically muttering at a lady in a limitless feather hat with leopard-print base, “It’s alriiight love, I don’t need maa eye.”

Words: Sarah Bonser

Photography: Cristine Leone