Charlie Le Mindu

'its English connection - a gritty sense of authenticity'

Charlie Le Mindu is Dalston's superboy. The ex-hairdresser from Bordeaux brought European eccentricity to British shores. Screaming pigs, the smell of dried blood and ponytail gasmarks could only mark the assault on the sense that is a Le Mindu fahsion show. His A/W 2011 Collection, the perfect show to let the world know that London Fashion Week had begun.

Some may question why a frenchman drawing inspiration from the sexual underground of wartime Berlin would wish to show in London? Even his materials have foreign stamps with Mongolian wool and Austrian hair. It is however the unifying feature of the collection that shows its English connection - a gritty sense of authenticity. His raw untamed energy is a shining beacon of London’s obsession with alternative visions of beauty. Le Mindu captures the essence of a city where little manages to turn heads.

Showing in Paris, his collection would be described as Avant Garde then shunned for the lack of technical mastery in each piece. New York would fail to appreciate his authenticity preferring the polished perversions of Jeremy Scott. In Milan he would be overshadowed by Silvio Berlusconi’s ‘bunga’ parties. It is only LFW where his genius can be celebrated, his collection apart of the British zeitgeist.

The show was as always a visual delight, a heady collection leaving large amounts of vagina and breast on show. There were three pieces which defined the collection; a frontal ponytailed gasmask, a blond wigged floor length skirt under a thick veil and the finale piece an eagle-veiled headdress atop a virgin bride. This debauchery has a front row witness, Mindu latest convert Daphne Guinness who made his show her only London visit.

While some may say Le Mindu’s curtain bow in a butcher’s apron is a perfect metaphor for his butchery of fashion, he is but the king of aischrolatreia – the cult of the obscene, the worship of filth. Mindu has taken the crown of the English rebel, the successor to Alexander McQueen.

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