“There’s always a dark line running through my work,” said Matty Bovan. Of that specific-to-him fil noir, he added: “I enjoy an edge to the pretty: a dark underbelly you maybe just glimpse.”
Bovan applies his handmade practice to painstakingly curated deadstock flotsam in order to weave fantastical wearable worlds. This season’s manifestation was touched by the multidimensional weirdness of David Lynch’s female protagonists—surely that last look cherry print was for Twin Peaks’ Audrey Horne—and Nolan Miller’s mega-shouldered body of work as the costume designer for Dynasty. Another key actor was Plum, Bovan’s mother, who features in this season’s lookbook and whose own approach to appearance and style—“she’s always loved big shoulder pads and even bigger earrings”—helped gestate her son’s sensibility.
The collection was as layered as any Lynch character. Loose-looking spidery skeins of Bovan-knitted eyelash yarn in sectional reefs of color were deployed as cladding, hand-sewn over powerfully silhouetted taffeta and tulle bases. Bovan cut deadstock fabrics from Cheshire-based stretch-specialists Friedmans Ltd into floral outlines, letters, and abstractedly battered geometric shapes before layering them over taffeta bases as decorative montage. Bovan likes his looks “a little ravaged”: here he heat-bonded his hems to leave them as ragged as Krystle and Alexis after their brawl in Blake’s lilypond. Patches of lurex-toned lizard pattern and Versace-adjacent foulard print played against scribble-like vectors of lipstick-red tulle that cut across Bovan’s linebacker silhouettes.
The season’s assembled cast of imagined characters, glamorous and sinister, is finely reflected in this lookbook. To see it come further to life there is also a collection film, just posted on YouTube. It collides these hand-crafted Bovan-lensed visions of Twin Peaks and Denver with the damp sandstone atmosphere of York, the city that frames Bovan’s intuitively designed universe.