British designer Molly Goddard has been busy picking paint colours as well as putting the finishing touches to her AW21 collection –– her east London studio has undergone a colourful refit to provide the backdrop for her London Fashion Week film. The paint hue in question? “A slightly dull yellow,” she laughs.
“I’m so excited for it,” Goddard says of the film in which her forthcoming Lina dress (a tonal tulle masterpiece) is set to star. Add in the fact that the designer is also eight-and-a-half months pregnant with her first child and the excitement is reaching a fever pitch. In the days leading upto the collection’s premiere, Vogue asked Goddard to keep a diary of what goes into making the Lina dress in a bid to answer the questions that have been playing on our mind ever since Rihanna first stepped out in a zinging Goddard dress in May 2016 — how does she make her dresses? And, how much time does each one take to create?
Two days ago, a crisp screenshot of a model wearing the finished dress landed in my inbox, alongside a neat list of secret details revealing its inner workings. Today, we are catching up via an old-school phone call to unearth the final ingredients of any monumental Goddard gown: spontaneity and instant joy.
“I enjoy designing big dresses because the process is quite instantaneous, compared to the more laboured process of designing tailoring or shirting, where you’ll need to make a toile and have five separate fittings,” Goddard explains. “We often won’t make a toile for these dresses, we’ll just go for it.”
Each frilled Lina dress takes approximately one-and-a-half days to make, using the designer’s signature stiff Italian tulle (around 13m of fabric, to be exact). Goddard’s rule of thumb when it comes to scaling up? “Typically, the bigger the dress — especially in tulle — the more I enjoy the process. I really love the side of designing that’s about creating volume.”
Beneath the scene-stealing drama of the designer’s subversive fairytale gowns you’ll find intricate, hidden details, right down to the hand-smocked waistband. Her trick to creating that magical (and much-imitated) Molly Goddard bounce? The hem of the smocking meets a large bubble skirt that is slightly shorter at the front and covered in frills, “giving a squishy and irregular silhouette”.
Colour, of course, plays a big part. Pre-Covid-19, the ‘gown moment’ signposted the finale on Goddard’s LFW catwalks and would draw audible gasps from the FROW — the dress sashaying down the minimalist white runway like the first daub of paint on a bare canvas. “The colours do come very naturally, I suppose. I don’t really overthink them,” she adds.
The technique of mixing adjacent shades of tulle into tonal, frilled designs is something that Goddard first engineered for SS21. “This dress is a coral pink, with red dotted into the bust [there’s a matching counterpart in azure and sky blue within the AW21 collection] then a black underskirt.” The final colour hit arrives in the form of ultra-refined, golden platform boots — a renegade pairing that taps the high-jinks mood we’re all missing right now.
“I hope that intensifies this summer,” Goddard says of our collective longing to bring the power of fashion escapism into reality. “I know it will for me, I’m desperate to wear fun things. When I think of all the pieces I saved for a special moment and haven’t worn yet — why do we do that? Never again. I’ll be wearing big taffeta dresses to go, well, everywhere.”
Editor
Julia HobbsCredit
Lead image: Arthur Williams courtesy of Molly Goddard
