Harris Reed’s February 2024 Collection kicked off London Fashion Week with a peek into the ephemeral world of 19th-century shadow puppets. Inspired by the Victorian illustrations of fairy tale beings dancing across walls and around rooms, Reed’s latest collection emphasizes the silhouette. The captivating shadows share a synergy with Reed’s own design process; for him, the silhouette always appears first, showing themselves like a line-up of dramatic outlines. Once Reed has these silhouettes defined, the processes of placing fabrics and creating details can begin, until a new being takes shape. Treating these shapes like paper dolls, Reed meticulously ‘dressed’ his figures. 

In a departure from his typical monochromatic practices, the newest collection from Harris Reed incorporates both color and print. After a chance meeting with luxury wallcovering experts Fromnetal, Reed developed a sustainable solution to his colorful problem. Reed pieced together and repurposed Fromental’s archive silk wallpapers, using them as fabrics in his collection. Paper backings were carefully sponged away from the only remaining vintage hand-painted and embroidered wallpaper panels, some of which had hundreds of hours of hand-crafted embroidery work, comparable to couture levels of craftsmanship. The painstaking process of cutting, preserving, and restructuring such delicate textiles brought Reed’s comparison of the paper doll to life– like a child cutting up scraps of paper to craft their doll a new dress. 

The collection works as more than an ode to hand-embroidered wallpaper or structured, shadow-like silhouettes. There is also a clever nod to Victorian fashion in the corseted waistlines and exaggerated proportions at the hips and shoulders. The extreme structure of the Victorian-esk forms is countered with volume; exaggerated draping flows from a cinched waist, a ruched velvet skirt balloons from a sheer draped back dress, hand-beaded curtains give movement to a fitted form and a slim black gown is given an oversized feather trim. Circular forms, a recurring motif in Reed’s work, also make an appearance in his newest collection on exaggerated round lapels, on curved sleeves of a blue silk embroidered jacket, in crinoline skirts (another Victorian style) and on this season’s hats in collaboration with Vivienne Lake.