News From Ryan Skelton

Words: Eilidh Duffy

I catch Ryan Skelton as he’s taking a lunch break from his job at the SOAS library in central London. Pigeons coo and ambulance sirens blare intermittently in the background. We’re on a call, so I ask for a photograph of what he’s wearing. This way I can imagine him speaking from the garments in which he has decided to dress himself on that particular day. This is more important than you might initially think.

I am humoured: he is wearing a Cecile Tulkens dress shirt, wide open, with a peach taffy-coloured corset he found at a car boot sale cinched around his waist, waspie-style, suspenders jangling over the hips. On top of this he wears a gossamer pink dressing gown (the earlier, slightly quilted mid-20th-century style) from a Roman flea market and a coat designed by his brother, John Skelton (who also made his felt shoes and tartan trousers) for whom he often does research and consulting, a term he apparently loathes.

I ask him why he chose to wear this particular ensemble.

“I met with a lover last night and wore the outfit (though with a dress, not the shirt and corset) and en route I caught myself in a window and liked the combination of colours and draping effect while walking. Then today I was thinking: this outfit, especially in the library, is an ode to one of my favourite ever collections from Comme – the ‘beyond taboo’ lingerie-inspired collection for Autumn-Winter 2001.”

See. No one does it quite like Ryan.

We’re only slightly on the phone to talk about outfits, but mainly to discuss his new poetry performance, which will be happening at twos, Regent Studios this coming Sunday 26th April at 4pm. This show – a Sunday sermon he’s calling it – is about what Ryan does best: dressing. More specifically, his love of fine cloth and his penchant for over-ordering clothes made in these textiles to dress in, thus ending up in a large amount of debt.

The poem-performance, titled Oh cloth, dearest…, was conceived while immersing himself in Galliano-era Dior Couture shows over the darker, more dreary months of winter. This is something he does every single day, although the particular designer and timbre of fashion show usually rotates every couple of weeks (he is currently coming to the end of an Atelier Versace season). Fashion shows are a form of TV for Ryan, who, as you will find out from this News segment, is heavily invested in the circulation of fashion show history online. Galliano is particularly fitting for winter: “like pantomime, so ridiculous,” Ryan opines.

>> The Spring-Summer 2003 Dior Couture show that started Ryan’s thinking. A chaotic melange of costume references plundered from all over the world. Complicated, overwhelming, and “gives you so much to talk about”. <<

It’s the very real relationship he has with clothes, rather than the celluloid impressions of them, that will concern Ryan on Sunday. In this performance he will celebrate his cathartic and bacchanalian approach to the consumption of clothing. Rather than lambasting himself for being terrible with money, “the performance is me preaching as to why I buy so much, why I’m always in debt,” he explains. “This piece, it’s about the art of dressing and the seduction of getting dressed, because these clothes, they can transform the mundane.”

This mundanity is something Ryan is particularly allergic to. In Oh cloth, dearest… dressing, as an antidote, becomes “a summoning of what hurts deep in crevices of selfishness to be covered by a hallucinogenic shimmer.” While the sight of bleak contemporary dress on the train is met with utter disdain:

They think that constitutes as attire?

Or construction

desire left quite alone

Bored

Misery guts

Avid readers of bog will be more familiar with Ryan’s photography work (remember this?), in which he often uses self-portraiture as a medium to explore elements of his psyche in a decidedly public fashion. “My art practice is kind of my therapy,” he explains, “anything that’s very personal, I try to make it very abstract.” Clothing (or sometimes lack thereof) is a pivotal object within these photographs, which, as he explains, allow him to experiment with endless reinvention whilst holding on to a core identity. It also diverges from a typical fashion image, so they don’t become “easy to digest and to market”.

“It dawned on me that I’d never really written poetry about fashion and clothing and the psychology of wearing clothes,” he explains. “So, not just fashion, but clothing that has identity.” It’s this absolute dedication to how clothes feel, and what that means, that makes Ryan such a compelling, and convincing, researcher of dress.

Read on for Ryan’s most prized bankruptcy-inducing garment and fashion-related rabbit holes to dive into this weekend ✪

*Oh cloth, dearest… will be performed at twos, Regent Studios on Sunday 26th April at 4pm.

You know that moment when Carrie looks aghast at Miranda and exclaims: “I spent 40,000 on shoes”? Well, I can somewhat relate because of how much I paid in import duties for this wee little Comme des Garçons Autumn-Winter 1998 ‘Fusion’ number.

As seen on the catwalk in a fashion show without music, as Rei is an assassin and her clothes are just a bit better than that motley crew that is the rest of fashion month in the sweet March to April of 1998.

Why this payment was an essential as the garm is both complex and very simple – it is a little cryptic number to satisfy the mundanity of life. I love, love trying to dress as ambiguous as I can, don’t you? And the 1990s Comme era does help, does it not?

It suggests a uniform that doesn’t really bother me; you are not keeping up with conventional standards of being hot, but at the same time you clearly are very demanding for the highest craftsmanship in prêt-à-porter.

And don’t look obvious.

Or trendy.

It is just very direct.

Very decisive.

Cute dress.

Before I get to work or have to do my domestic duties I have to watch a fashion show while having my coffee. I mean, it’s caffeine in visual form, no?!

I often joke with my flatmates that I am getting changed in my 6th look when I put my moka pot on the gas and quick-as-you-can dash upstairs to get dressed for the day. To try to look as Prada-catwalk-worthy as I can with the petite funds I have and the slim amount of time before the coffee may get burnt. And I will run, I will fall down those steps to get it off the gas. Pedro Almodóvar would grin at me doing so and keep the camera rolling.

God, you wouldn’t believe the amount of collections from the 1990s to 2000s I pray to see on video, and yet for some deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeply annoying reason (the simple fact that they are not online) I won’t be seeing. Ann Demeulemeester Autumn-Winter 2000, or Balenciaga Autumn Winter 2000, 2001 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005 – or Spring-Summer 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 in better quality. Or Helmut Lang Autumn-Winter 1999 and Spring-Summer 1998 and 1999 or Comme des Garçons Autumn-Winter 1997 or Yohji Yamamoto Spring-Summer 1998 or Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture Autumn-Winter 1997. WHERE ARE THEY?!

There are at least 50 more that I could list. I wish I was saying so in jest.

But yes, the spring erupted with aplomb and vigour when this Comme show got transported to the public domain.

I mean,

Talk about killer.

Talk about I need to see that draping in its full 3D fit.

Talk about no music but the occasional Nokia beeping away as silent mode was not yet invented, clearly.

And the models have loads of outfit changes.

Because that’s the common denominator with the 1990s that I can’t seem to shake off – the you have a minute to get changed so no fussy irritating styling tricks plz just plain old very good designer clothing to grab and go– FIRST LOOKS!

I want clothes like this.

You plebs, you think you know this and that on fashion, well you are so deeply entrenched in being wrong because The Fashion Spot members know what’s what my dear. By mercy when fashion month rolls into town those anonymous critics are on it. The severity!

I first frequented TFS on the Abbey Lee Kershaw thread when I was an A-Level student 14 years ago. As we all know, everyone is on the side-hustle journey of being an oracle of high fashion via the vessel of social media. HOWEVER, the me! me! me! vibe of it all is just not the same as the reddit vibe in which one is not getting paid a dime. I don’t know who these people are but by jove, do I know their opinions.

And those opinions are really special when apathy in fashion criticism is a popular sensibility – the anonymity is needed when one is fine with not getting invited to the party. The no-invitation-to-the-show aspect may pertain as to why those in opposition to TFS just view it as those being salty with no face to match their opinions.

I have thoroughly enjoyed being a lurker on the forums for 14 years and only on the very very few occasions have I spoken above the parapet when I argued why Prada Autumn-Winter 2024 was a good marriage between Raf and Miuccia’s sensibilities (under the username Razzer), but 98% of the time I am just lurking away feeling no need to contribute but to listen away attentively like a monk.

A forum member we all love is PDFSD – time to learn! Go lurk.

The French Institute in West pulled out all the finest embroidery with a weekday afternoon showing of Visconti’s The Leopard. Gosh, to depart from this mortal coil – yet still be conscious! Such is the spellbinding allure of a Visconti film that simply demands to be seen on the largest screen: the detail, the set design, the palaces, the long vistas of courtship, the severe lack of people in the audience on a Thursday afternoon, the virginal experience of being baptised into the French Institute cinema with such a splendour of filmmaking – take me!

I ate a coconut macaroon before and wore a low heel.

I will be campaigning to see more Visconti at such a fine establishment. Imagine, The Damned!

To tie this up with a bow I have to share the most powerful thing I have encountered this week.

All due to someone returning the DVD at my work and then… How pertinent, that 21:49 mins delivers multiple layers of thought.

Beautiful.

Ciao for now!