Sex, gender and rebellion were what everyone was talking about – and designers with the most to say didn’t show clothes at all

My favourite part of a really good catwalk show often happens about three minutes after the last model has walked down the runway. There is the bow, the applause and then, amid the general rush for the exit, a breakaway group battles backstage (an inelegant bunfight, this bit) to pin down the designer, and record their thoughts on a swarm of iPhones.

Sometimes, the chat is about Harris Tweed; sometimes it’s about David Hockney. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, in the backstage din. One time, I thought Miuccia Prada said her collection had been about democracy and another paper’s fashion editor thought she had said it was about moccasins. Could very easily have been either.

For the last few seasons, London fashion week has been talking politics in slogan T-shirts, but this season the tone shifted. These clothes will mostly go on sale next March, yet almost no one mentioned Brexit. Designers talked about sex and gender, and ageing and rebellion, and nonconformity, and mental health. Riccardo Tisci, making his debut for Burberry, was pretty much duty-bound to talk about the Queen and punk and flags and subcultures, but his chat backstage after the show was still mostly personal. “I came to England when I was 17, and very shy. This is where I cracked out of my egg,” he said. (It sounds better if you say it in an Italian accent, but you get the gist.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christopher Kane at LFW. Photograph: Pixelformula/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock

Christopher Kane talked about sex. The soundtrack to his show spliced together the words of Marilyn Monroe, who said she felt her sexuality made her a burden to society, and David Attenborough discussing sex in nature.

“Everyone experiences sex uniquely and none of us really knows how it is for anyone else,” said Kane. (Case in point: the black lace tongues on his catwalk shoes looked like Playboy bunny ears to me, but Kane called them his “praying mantis” shoes. “She’s coming to get you, y’know?”).

Erdem Moralıoğlu left a clue to his show on every seat, in the form of Victorian portraits of two famous sisters, Franny and Stella, who lived 150 years ago in the Bloomsbury street into which Moralıoğlu recently moved. The “sisters” were in fact Frederik Park and Ernest Boulton, well-known faces of Victorian nightlife, who were arrested in 1870 and charged with “conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence”.

“This was not long before Oscar Wilde’s trial, a time when London was becoming more conservative, and I was really interested in these people who dressed to be who they felt they were. And what I like best about this story is that the jury acquitted them and they continued to live as women,” he says.

Huge veiled hats hid the fact that two men featured in Erdem’s line-up (although their hairy legs gave the game away.) Tailored blazers with an exaggerated nipped-in waist – an early trend for next season – brought together masculine and feminine aspects of Victorian fashion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Burberry show, LFW. Photograph: Scott Garfitt/REX/Shutterstock

Michael Halpern’s muse for the season was his grandmother, a snappy dresser in the Bronx of the 1960s – “a time when women’s rights debates raged and the foundation was built for an American future – now at risk of reverting to everything our grandmothers fought against.”

The woman wearing Molly Goddard this season has, according to Molly, “acquired a slight flush and is unsure whether it’s down to the sunburn or the cervezas, but she doesn’t care and it becomes her … she has dressed to please herself.”

The two high-profile female new arrivals on the schedule, Victoria Beckham and Alexa Chung, both addressed, albeit obliquely, the issue of getting older. Beckham cast Stella Tennant to open her show because she wanted her 10th anniversary show to be “about women, not just about girls” while Chung has started obsessing over style icons in the decades beyond their pomp. Jane Birkin in the 1980s, in jeans and sneakers in Paris, rather than in the teeny mini-dresses of the late 1960s.

Some of the designers with the most to say at this fashion week didn’t show any clothes on the catwalk at all. Accessories queen Anya Hindmarch gave us utopia, shoe designer Nicholas Kirkwood, dystopia. Hindmarch’s Chubby Cloud presentation involved lying on the world’s biggest bean bag, gazing up at a Rubens ceiling and listening to a live reading of the shipping forecast. It had normally jaded fashion editors babbling and weepy.

There were no clothes to be seen, but the pop-up shop open to the 2,100 people who joined in over the weekend did brisker business than Bond Street. Nicholas Kirkwood collaborated with the actor Rose McGowan to turn a shoe showcase into an immersive theatrical production about a female-led resistance uprising, set in a sci-fi near-future Britain in which self-expression has been forbidden. Both shows plugged their creators into the fashion week circuitry in a way no simple model line-up could.

But you will be glad to hear that fashion week did not neglect the most serious matter of all: what to wear next season. A blazer with a waist is probably the place to start: we saw these at Burberry as well as Erdem, and Victoria Beckham wore one herself on the morning of her show. Also, the body or leotard or camisole as a flimsy, filmy base layer to wear with some slouchy trousers or a pleated skirt is definitely happening. Polka dots are still the new stripes. Boardshorts are the new denim cutoffs.

And the new black? Inspired by the vegetables-as-clutch-bags sported at Molly Goddard, I’m calling it savoy cabbage green. Because, why not? This is London fashion week. Crazy ideas are the whole point.