Last season, Lee Mathews filled the first portion of her 25th anniversary runway show with dresses, outerwear, and sets that were predominantly white. It brought the focus to her silhouettes, which are characteristically intricate, unconstraining, and wearable in equal measure. Her latest collection was born of a new excitement about other time-honed archetypes.
“The pushing forward to find all the new ideas… I’d rather go and be reminded of some of the things we used to do that were lovely, and haven’t seen the light of day for a long time, and start to re-work those,” Mathews shared. That began this season with “digging through the linen cupboard” of archival samples to find pieces that sparked joy in the present. Her daughter Matilda—who scours eBay and Depop and other resale sites to find older Lee Mathews pieces, as a way of owning memories of her mother’s work from her own childhood—was a key inspiration. Mother and daughter refer to this accumulation of material memories as a “magic cupboard.” “It sounds a bit sentimental,” the designer said of the process of looking back, “but it actually felt right.”
That manifested in a collection of punchy hues, which played to Mathews’s abilities with color and composition, working as memories seen with fresh eyes. There were pairings of white cottons with bold primary colors, as well as nimble knits and floaty organza confections. Detailed patterns and girlish ribbon adornments were countered by invigorating monochromatic pieces, like a gauzy aqua-blue organza dress, over a corresponding slip with tiny flowers dotted across. Mathews can pinpoint memories associated with some looks, but steered clear of too-obvious replications of the past, using intuition to find a midway point between then and now. “[Most of] the prints are actually prints from previous collections, but you wouldn’t recognize them,” she added. “I think that’s what I would like to do going forward: take from the past to put in the future, and keep evolving the chemistry.”
She is also considering having the collection’s exhilarating pink pieces in store windows when the range arrives at boutiques in time for southern hemisphere high summer, for a jolt of energy and exuberance.