London Fashion Week SS12: Ashley Isham

This is a guest post by Maria Pierides, one of our fabulous competition winners. She’s been hitting the tents at Somerset House as a guest fashion reporter for My Fashion Life to cover as many of London’s spring shows as she can make – find out how she got on when we armed her with a bag full of tickets and sent her packing…

Who: Ashley Isham

What: The Hollywood edition – if a celeb needs an Oscar dress, this would be a perfect place to start. A vibrant and varied colour palette on delicate materials – mostly romantic silks and playful leathers. Influences from British furniture man Thomas Chippendale were weaved into the collection, as were Rococo-inspired embellishments.

Highlights: We loved the theatrical headgear and make-up, but more so the fact that not a single one of the pieces was upstaged by the extra gimmicks. The deep purple and royal blue dresses were some of our stand-out pieces, as was the fuchsia one shouldered mullet dress.

Lowlights: The small parade of white, patterned mini dresses happened too quickly at the end of the show – it would have been nice to study them individually in more detail.

Overall: Ashley Isham likes his headgear, doesn’t he? It was a prominent theme in his last collection and it plays just as big a part in this one too. However, where last season he varied the head pieces, Isham stuck to a few favourites this time, although he extended the head accessorising to his models’ foreheads as well. This collection essentially captures the spirit of summer both in terms of the colour palette and the Mediterranean and Asian influences. Cheryl Cole, Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga are famous fans of his razor sharp tailoring and intricate attention to detail, and in this collection, it’s clear to see why.

More pictures from Ashley Isham’s spring/summer 2012 collection to come…