Molly Goddard, a Young Design Star at Home at the V&A Museum
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Version 0 of 1. On a recent summer morning, just days before she was due to present a fashion show at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the fashion designer Molly Goddard left her home in Ladbroke Grove, West London. She wandered through Hyde Park (stopping to attempt to feed some parakeets), before arriving finally at the majestic V&A Museum in southwest London. The 28-year-old Goddard has been coming to the V&A, which is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts, since she was a child. “Because it is a bit off central London, it always felt easier and calmer to me,” she said. Goddard is fascinated by the museum’s idiosyncratic mix of artifacts ranging from medieval religious sculptures to Chinese imperial treasures — and has drawn inspiration from the pieces in unexpected ways. “I like that it is a hodgepodge — seeing the weird things that people used to have in their houses,” she said. Later this week, Goddard will present her show as part of Fashion in Motion, the finale of a weeklong public festival celebrating the opening of the V&A’s new Exhibition Road courtyard. It will be free and open to the public. The presentation is her second appearance at the museum this year; a dress she designed was featured in the recent “Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion” exhibition, to illustrate the wide influence Balenciaga has had on designers. Goddard joins a prestigious cast of designers, including Alexander McQueen and Grace Wales Bonner, who have been invited to present at Fashion in Motion, an initiative set up by the museum to showcase live runway events by designers to a wider audience. For Goddard, the V&A is the latest addition in a list of iconic show venues — she has previously turned the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Tate Modern into immersive backdrops for her presentations. The V&A show also marks the next stage in Goddard’s evolution as a designer; she has become one of London’s brightest new talents and has made a signature out of opulent, decadent concoctions of tulle and taffeta in skewed proportions. In only three years, Goddard has been nominated in the British Emerging Talent category at the British Fashion Awards and was a finalist for this year’s LVMH Prize. But before her show, Goddard revisited some of her favorite spaces in the museum and scoured the archives for new inspiration. In the Art Library, she browsed through musty editions on the French Renaissance and Picasso. “I often have no plan and come and just pull books off the wall so it can be a bit daunting coming here,” she said. During her time as a student at Central Saint Martins (she dropped out before completing her MA to start her own label in 2014), she spent many hours there — though, she says, she prefers artist’s monographs and old history books to anything on fashion. There are often historical references in her designs, “but it’s never just one thing,” she said, citing an interest in 17th-century nightgowns and Victorian dresses. Later, Goddard roamed through the Weston Cast Court that contains painstaking reproductions of some of the most famous sculptures in the world. She paused in front of a cast of Michelangelo’s “The Rebellious Slave” and Donatello’s bronze sculpture of David. She explained that some of these sculptures helped inspire one of the sets of her upcoming fashion show: Her mother, the set designer Sarah Edwards, made gigantic objects “that look like sculptures wrapped up for transportation.” Goddard grew especially excited in the Ceramics Study Gallery, gazing in awe at glass cabinets full of intricate figurines and delicate Delft pottery. “I like things that look like so much effort has gone into them but they are impractical,” she said. “I like imagining the people making them.” Dressed in a burnt orange smock dress from her fall 2016 collection and sneakers, Goddard seemed preternaturally relaxed — likely a result of a recent holiday in Mallorca with her boyfriend and business partner, Tom Shickle. Besides Shickle, Goddard works closely with her family on the label. Her mother creates the sets for her shows (with the help of her father, a graphic designer) and her younger sister, Alice, casts the models and styles the shows. Finally she arrived at the Sainsbury Gallery, a 1,100-square-meter exhibition space designed by the architect Amanda Levete which will serve as the venue for the show. The space is vast, modern and sleek — a stark contrast to many of V&A’s overflowing galleries. “I like the clutter and craftiness so it was important to bring that into the space,” Goddard said. Famous pieces from V&A’s permanent collection helped inspire the set pieces for Goddard’s show, including “The State Bed from Melville House, Fife” (a spectacular four-poster bed upholstered in red fabric that her mother has remade using air beds). The show will include a mix of Goddard’s archival pieces, as well as six new items created especially for the presentation. To select the “greatest hits,” Goddard and her sister cut out line sheets from her old collections and mixed them up into different looks. “It’s fun that it all fits together really well,” Goddard said. “It is about celebrating the old things we’ve done — before moving onto something new.” |