Scribbles on a flattened cheese and onion crisp packet form one of the first posters for Loverboy, the monthly club night Charles Jeffrey hosted in Dalston’s Vogue Fabrics to fund his eponymous fashion label. Ten years on, the Loverboy brand is now well on its way to becoming a household name with its signature bunny-ear knitted hats and eye-popping tartan – yet it remains as playful, punky and true to itself as ever.
Celebrating ten years of the fashion powerhouse, The Lore of Loverboy is a pay-what-you-can exhibition at Somerset House, in the same building as Jeffrey’s studios. We start in the mid-2010s: early sketches from Jeffrey’s years as a BA student at Central Saint Martins hang next to images of Basquiat paintings and a distressed Isle of Arran knit. Clips of his AW18 show, directed by Nick Knight, roll into the music video for The Horrors’s ‘Sheena is a Parasite’: all strobes, screams and heavy liner. We see nods to Vivienne Westwood, to Andy Warhol, to folklore festivals in Orkney and to Louis XIV. The influences are wild and vivid, condensed down into gender-bending clothes which look as anarchic as they do fabulous.
The influences are wild and vivid, condensed down into clothes which look as anarchic as they do fabulous
The whole thing is firmly rooted in Jeffrey’s flamboyant character, his queerness and his Scottish heritage. Stand-outs include the certificate of the official registry of the signature red, blue and black Loverboy tartan and a screen showing the @peoplewearingcharlesjeffrey Instagram account, before we reach the final room. This one is lit brighter, it’s quieter, more elevated. Nine tall, imposing mannequins, each dressed in one of Jeffrey’s custom show-stoppers, stand around: there’s the soft white armour worn by Tilda Swinton on the cover of British Vogue, Harry Styles’s shimmering silver tailored jumpsuit for his ‘Love on Tour’ shows, and a fantastic, Queen of Hearts-esque runway ball gown. Some of the details are quite breathtaking.
This is more than a fashion exhibition: it’s a decade of youth culture via music, art, nightclubs and drag shows. Sure, it shows Loverboy on catwalks and in magazines, in music videos and trailing red carpets, but it also journeys through dance floors, weaving mills, the empty coffee cups and tape measures strewn all over his pattern cutting studio and out into the street and smoking areas. It feels inherently London: it’s edgy, a little bit chaotic, it has a sense of humour – and it was born from a multitude of references, all effortlessly woven throughout.
We see how he built something from scratch, from a sweaty basement club at the top of Kingsland Road, into something that has achieved commercial success without sacrificing its soul. The result is truly joyful: it gives you hope for the future of British fashion, for music and art.
