School’s back in session at Skepta’s Mains.
While class might’ve started 45 minutes late, once it got going, there was tons of fun collegiate flair: white shirts with black rulers, protractors and scissors floating across them, pleated skirts, tailored pinstripe suits, and boxy leather gym shorts.
In a preview with WWD, the musician described feeling horribly embarrassed on non-uniform days at school. His mother, a Princess Diana superfan, would dress him and his brother up like Princes William and Harry in secondhand clothes, all nerdy tweed jackets, trousers and “nice” collared shirts, when all he wanted to wear was sneakers.
How heartwarming, then, that this season Skepta looked to the musical “Matilda” as a reference after his five-year-old daughter, River, fell in love with the play after seeing it on her birthday.
But this being Skepta, a British stylemaker, there was nothing nerdy to see here. Colorful punchy prints, silvery embroidered denim and faux fur hats-cum-wigs added an edgy anime feel — another one of Skepta’s references
In the show’s last period, the musical’s final track, “When I Grow Up,” blared triumphantly through the Royal Horticultural Halls. Skepta and a crew of kids — including his daughter, who closed the show with her dad last season, and his son — raced around the locker-laden runway.
Its opening refrain goes: “When I grow up / I will be tall enough to reach the branches/ That I need to reach to climb the trees / You get to climb when you’re grown up.”
