Bianca Saunders is raring to go and radiating positivity. No wonder. Her skilled and nuanced angle on modern masculinity has been bringing her a deluge of international awards and recognition over the past year. She took home the 2021 Andam prize, was a finalist for the LVMH Prize, and was chosen by Alessandro Michele to be one of the young designers whose collections are selling on Gucci Vault. Throughout it all, she’s been working in the studio space awarded to emerging designers at the Sarabande Foundation in London. “I feel like that’s actually what’s been so completely life-changing,” she smiled, over Zoom.
This is Saunders’s largest collection yet—30 looks subtly inspired by family photos taken by her mother, at age 18, in Jamaica. Saunders zeroed in on the “in-between tailored and casual” style of her uncles in their polo shirts and Sta-Prest trousers to inform her evolving interest in cut, how men wear clothes, and how fabric sits on bodies. “A lot of my work is observational,” she said.
Saudners doesn’t quite have the terminology for the way she eases and pares fabric, rolls shoulder lines forward, twists trouser seams, and likes to conceal fastenings. This season, she created a curved, rounded sleeve inspired by “muscle men” and figured out how to give easy-to-wear jersey pieces the illusion of smartness (a collab with Farah). She also took her invisible-fastening concept a step further by turning tailored jackets into lightweight “pullovers.”
The difficulty is that her garment subtleties don’t necessarily show in photographs. But the quality of her clothes certainly does impress hard-to-impress people in real life, as proven in front of the judging committee of the Andam Prize. (Put it this way: Phoebe Philo was on the panel that elected her.) Saunders has a convincingly authentic grip on exactly who she’s aiming to dress: “I actually visualize or imagine this guy walking along the road. I really want people to see themselves in my clothes. Any type of like masculine guy. I guess the main point of my brand is just making people feel good, and making them feel elegant,” she shrugs, half-laughing. “You know, like a luxury man.”
There’s a reason that Saunders is releasing her digital lookbook now, during Paris Fashion Week. It’s because this collection is just the precursor, the build-up to the one she’ll be showing in January’s during the men’s show. It will definitely be on the runway (or in another IRL presentation form, TBC), anyway. Saunders did really well, worked incredibly hard, and truly found herself as a designer during pandemic isolation. Now, she can’t wait to get out of the digital bind, and grab the opportunity to show the world who she is.
