More than meets the eye to this cutting-edge design...

London Fashion Week has seen scores of shredded garments being sent down the runway. Joseph Bobowicz explains why this isn’t just a trend – it’s a statement about the industry

- Joseph Bobowicz

London Fashion Week, much like the UK’s public spending, has been undergoing serious cuts. Aside from a roll call of regular names slashed from the truncated show schedule – Patrick McDowell, Aaron Esh, Feben and 16Arlington among them –there’s also been widespread slashing in the clothes themselves, with everyone from Simone Rocha through to Jawara Alleyne taking scissor to cloth. However, what is ostensibly a basic pattern-cutting flourish felt especially loaded at a time when both the British fashion industry and the country itself are being cleaved by the effects of Brexit and the cost of living crisis.

After first cropping up during New York Fashion Week in Thom Browne’s lacerated kilts – splicing dogtooth tweeds, Prince of Wales checks and grosgrain straps – the trend has now taken off on our doorstep. Perhaps stateside it was a mere act of calculated couture, accidentally reflecting on the tearing apart of, well, some of the most essential civic policies in the US. Here, in Old Blighty, it felt no less acute.

Consider, for example, Caymanian-Jamaican designer Jawara Alleyne’s outing, which was tellingly titled