As our final-year BA Fashion students share their work with the world, we speak to Gus Langford (BA Fashion: Fashion Print) about his project English Shame.
Gus Langford grew up in a house in rural England full of things from across the world. His inspirations have always been from places beyond home. “My upbringing became a shallow colonialist bricolage of all these cultures with a resulting rejection of Anglo-Saxon culture,” he explains, “I have always looked to other cultures that I find much more fascinating, beautiful and exciting than my own.”
This process of self-reflection began nine months ago with the start of his final collection. He had decided to focus early 90s hip-hop culture in US and as a middle-class white English man, Langford spent time struggling to approach the subject in the least problematic way. Each week he would present some new approach to his tutor David Kappo and his classmates and each week the question would come back: why are you doing this?
“I went away one week and really asked myself. I was soul searching and decided that I didn’t have the right answers. My classmates and tutors were saying that I could do it, but I just needed to have the right answers. I didn’t and I had a bit of breakdown.”
Langford began exploring why he had always distanced himself from his own white Anglo-Saxon culture and the project changed direction. When previously he would spend time in the library, travelling across the globe in books and selecting whatever he was attracted to, now he paused. His first step was substantive conversations with tutors and fellow students about what he was trying to navigate:
“Growing up, I’ve always been on the side against white masculinity while also being a white male. All the figures I detest across the world today are white males. That’s a confusing place to be.”
The collection became the visual manifestation of that confusion. Though working on the Print pathway, he began with the form. Langford worked on a series of amorphous shapes growing out from the body that make visible the sense of both discomfort and confinement. The initial idea for the catwalk collection was that over the six looks the shapes would grow and become more overt and extreme.
He turned to English folk art for references, from pub signs and Staffordshire pottery to collages by George Smart and heraldic pageantry. Going against his usual aesthetic attractions, does Langford find any beauty in these objects? “I do, to an extent. With a lot of the folk art, there’s an amazing naivete and brutalism to it. It would be hard for me to make this at all if I had found all the references repulsive.”
The symbol central to his collection however – the St George cross from the English flag – was different. Co-opted by far-right groups such as the English Defence League, it is a symbol heavy with contemporary meaning. “It is such a graphic image,” says Langford, “there’s such a threat to it, it’s shocking.” Combining the cross with folk imagery and references to far-right marches, contemporary politicians, as well as his own declaratory statements, his work moved away from metaphorical subtlety. One of the objects in the final collection is an English flag with “I feel nothing but shame to be a white, English male” painted across it.
Gallery
Words reoccur across garments. Langford created a tartan-style fabric – an identifier of genealogy and patriotism – with phrases "British and Ashamed" or "White Male Shame" running throughout. The clothes themselves appear layered, as the framed forms burst out from under them, revealing the tartan below.
With social isolation making the annual BA Fashion catwalk show impossible, Langford became the only model for his collection. “The model selection was going to be really problematic,” he says, “I couldn’t do a collection about white male privilege and hire only white male models. That would be so hypocritical. But then I also didn’t want to put this shame and difficult imagery onto other people. Then lockdown happened and I had to model it anyway!” With lockdown, Langford returned home to the English countryside and, with satisfying circularity, he found himself completing and setting his work in the very place of non-belonging that inspired it.