pretty as a pansy...

If pushed to pick my favourite flower, I'm obviously going to say peony but if you asked me what I thought was the friendliest flower there could only be one winner - the humble pansy.

With their bright engaging open happy little faces. They look trustworthy and loyal , so maybe it is small wonder that Christoher Kane has his first cruise collection collection on them.

“The pansy seems so simple, so everyday; it just came into my head to use it as the basis for a collection, there is a purity of shape, following the outline of the flower in the over-sized photo prints, and these are clothes that we wanted to keep close to the freshness of our hand-made toiles. When I researched the pansy more, it took on a deeper meaning; it stands for thoughtfulness and is ultimately a symbol of freethinking"

Here, the flower shapes the clothing quite literally in terms of the cut and fit of some of the garments, but it is perhaps the flower’s symbolic role that ultimately transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary for Christopher and Tammy Kane.

The floral motif is approached in a hyper-real, larger-than-life way; photo prints unfurl around the body and dictate an overall organic sense to the shape of silhouettes. At the same time, the domesticity and honesty of the pansy forms the basis for a typical Kane stream of consciousness approach to the design process for the rest of the collection.

Shimmering, iridescent leather and sequins add a Disney-like, animated sheen and lightness to the collection and the minute any girl sees this huge pansy leather bag it is going to feel like instant summer in their heart….

Queen Marie