The buzzed-about designer sheds light on her latest creative endeavour with cult collaborators Theo Sion and Alice Goddard
Molly Goddard’s dresses are a bohemian teenage dream – diaphonous layers of smocked tulle in sun-bleached shades of grey, vanilla, yellow and dusty pink worn atop flannel trousers, velvet leggings and loveworn jeans. Inspired by the eclectic outfits of affluent British art students in the 1950s, she staged her A/W15 collection as a live life drawing class, complete with paint-spattered wooden easels, a naked sitter and models clad in frothy taffeta frocks and shrunken lurex sweaters. Now, she showcases the line in a striking new postcard series, styled by her sister Alice Goddard and lensed by photographer, Theo Sion. We chatted to the innovative trio to find out more...
On the concept behind the series...
Molly Goddard: "It was shot in a practice studio. The presentation was based on a life drawing class at college so it seemed fitting."
Alice Goddard: "The images were based on Molly's research and the life drawing presentation. The postcard format was in reference to gallery postcards you pick up on art class school trips. I helped Molly with research for the collection, so built up an idea of what the collection was about, or what it meant to me, from that."
Theo Sion: "I wanted the pictures to evoke the feeling of classical paintings and drawings but wanted to remove them from the artist's studio reference that had been Molly's focus, so Alice and I thought it would be interesting to introduce a performing-arts element – like we'd gone into the next class down the hall to cast and shoot it."
On their model of choice…
AG: "That’s Isa Rose Conroy, one of the street-cast models we chose for the presentation."
TS: "She looked really cool in the show, her expression is so perfectly grumpy and confident."
On the importance of casting…
MG: "Working with models who we have street cast, or are friends, in the lead up to the show is one of my favourite parts, the whole look comes together and you can design for the individual - that's vital. I would hate to do the casting the night before the show."
AG: "It's such an important way of summing up the collection and adding the element of character to the clothing. I always like models to be unrecognisable, because I think that helps their character to come though without anyone's preconceived ideas of who they are or what they're like."
On working together…
AG: "One of the best things about collaborating is that we often interpret the same imagery quite differently, I think this series is a real product of that."
MG: "We have contrasting tastes, which I think works so well when combined."
On satisfying a sweet craving...
AG: "On the shoot we had a bag of giant chocolate buttons and spent a while discussing the best ways to eat them - concave to concave or convex to convex, or concave to convex to concave in my case. It's the simple things."
TS: "I eat one at a time."
