At Mulberry, the Axe Was Fundamental

“I was thinking about this whole idea of maintaining a tree,” Christopher Kane tells Alexander Fury of his Spring/Summer 2027 collection at Mulberry. “Cutting back, to bear new fruit.”

A few weeks before his debut show for Mulberry, Christopher Kane is talking about axes. Axes, tree surgeons, cutting away to create new growth. It’s all very fitting for a brand named Mulberry. “The axe was fundamental,” he says. He’s holding a bag he’s called the Chop, which is based on the sheaths used to protect axe blades. Another, with a curved bottom, is called the Rocker. As in, off your, for basing a collection around hatchets when Ryan Murphy has just launched his (largely panned) reimagining of the story of (possible) axe-wielding homicidal maniac Lizzie Borden.

Come to think of it, a woman wronged, wreaking bloody revenge in puff-sleeved Victoriana is exactly the kind of inspirational gist Christopher and Tammy Kane love in their mill. I can’t think of any other designer who could create collections inspired by Elvira meeting Rambo, or Carrie fused with Crocodile Dundee, or indeed a paean to the suburban madam Cynthia Payne, who operated a brothel out of her house in Streatham, south London. But Lizzie and her whacks weren’t the starting point. “I was thinking about this whole idea of maintaining a tree,” Christopher said. “Cutting back, to bear new fruit.” He’s speaking from Mulberry’s headquarters – and, fittingly enough, the brand’s tree logo is embossed everywhere. It doesn’t take a horticulturalist to see that Kane is talking not generally, but about a specific genus of plant here – namely, the 55 year old British institution he was appointed to helm back in March. “New growth,” he says. Well, it’s a Spring/Summer collection, after all.

It’s new growth for both Mulberry and the Kanes, who have been transplanted from east to west – which, as any Londoner will tell you, are worlds apart. The Kanes come as a threesome – Christopher, his sister and right-hand woman Tammy, who’s been with him from the start, and his nine year old Boston Terrier Bruce Tito. I first met the latter as a four-week-old back in 2017 – and while he’s less rambunctious these days, the rest of the scene is pretty similar. The Kanes are hands-on designers, and although much of the collection isn’t here, they are still pulling together looks and explaining their thought processes in tackling Mulberry’s legacy.

Tackling is the right term – and not just for the football terrace references built into scuffed-up sweatshirts plastered across the chest with the Mulberry logo, which the duo say reference football casuals they remember growing up in Glasgow. “When we look back, those moments of non-fashion are the best,” says Christopher. “The helmet head perm, T-shirt tucked into a white leather pencil skirt, the denier tights.” There’s plenty of intentionally dodgy white leather in this collection, and some Brutalist, council-estate concrete grey too, all cut paper-fine and used for coats, skirts and boxy jackets. The Kanes were thinking, they said, of city, town and country, of women moving between those different places and different ways of dressing. There were country checks, Working Girl slicker leather dresses, school uniforms, and floral prints pulled, they said, from wallpapers and lampshades from Mulberry’s successful home-line in the 1980s. 

That’s because there isn’t much else there. Mulberry may be halfway through its sixth decade, but its fashion still feels nascent – underdeveloped, even. The Kanes were fortunate to work with a manufacturer who retains a healthy archive of the outerwear pieces they’ve created for the brand across the years; while that dog-eared Mulberry sweatshirt was the only piece they directly referenced: it was basically reproduced, warts and all. Given Mulberry’s fashion business has been on hiatus, meaning manufacturers and suppliers had to largely be rediscovered, it makes it all the more remarkable that the Kanes pulled this collection together in two months (it was ready earlier in the year for commercial reasons). Of course, what Mulberry does have is bags, produced in a Somerset factory named the Rookery which constitutes the largest manufacturer of luxury leather goods in the United Kingdom. “And everywhere you go, everywhere we go, we see a Mulberry bag now,” says Tammy. “They put so much love and attention in these amazing bags, that last forever.”

Bags are, of course, the big business for Mulberry. There’s even a canny embrace of that by the Kanes – searching for a Mulberry marker, they alighted on the flap of the Bayswater bag, notching its crenellations into everything from leather coats to thigh-riding skirts to neat school jumpers (a couple in the burgundy of the Kanes’ own alma mater). “It’s the idea of looking to heritage, keeping it as a foundation, not a limitation,” says Christopher. They felt like a badge of belonging – and, of course, they constituted more chops.

If Mulberry has bags, the Kanes have baggage – but not in a bad way. They bring a distinct fashion sensibility, 20 years of innovation, experimentation and reference. The Kanes don’t have a silhouette, but they do have an innovative approach to materiality, and those aforementioned wickedly diverse references. They also have a look – we wound up talking about their propensity for mixing the precious with the humdrum, like a sweater or T-shirt thrown over some kind of embellished skirt. The same was true here.

At its root, Mulberry isn’t too different to Kane’s own operation, founded by Roger Saul at his kitchen table in Somerset. “Just like us in Dalston Lane,” says Christopher – he and Tammy famously made their first collections in their tiny flat, sourcing materials like cheap tights and dodgy lace from nearby Ridley Road market and machining them themselves. 

There’s no stitched-together tights on the rails at Mulberry, but there is an anorak in the same shade of hazmat orange as the opening bandage dress from Kane’s first-ever show. “Irn-Bru, someone said,” Christopher allows. “That wasn’t deliberate – but we love Irn-Bru.” It also looks more than a little like Kenny from South Park – online commentators had a field day with that. But, of course, that knots into those perverse Kane references, running the gamut from pop culture to the esoteric and arcane. 

An astute fashion commentator compared the Kanes’ Mulberry debut to Marc Jacobs’ first turn for Louis Vuitton in 1998. It’s a different time, a different city, and all a smaller scale. But you see what they meant. It was there in the look, but also in a broader fashion sense, in projecting a brand identity beyond bags and into something wider, and much more meaningful.