Studio One at Abbey Road Studios has undoubtedly seen a lot of diva rockstar behavior in its storied history, but perhaps nothing quite the likes of what Charles Jeffrey had going on there yesterday afternoon. There was Francesco Risso dancing around with his head painted gold, someone wielding a soft trumpet made of glitter, and band members playing a set in Charles Jeffrey Loverboy tartan suits, plus Genesis Webb, Lyas, and various models coming and going across the set, all while the designer himself directed proceedings dressed in a white coat and Horrors wig.
This was not a fashion show, but a happening with friends of the house—like Marni’s Risso, who Jeffrey calls “a mentor of mine”—although there was an actual sound recording going on as well. “We’re reiterating to the world around us that Loverboy is more than just clothes,” said the eternally shape-shifting Jeffrey, who was last seen as an almost Weimar Republic ringmaster of a queer wrestling match at Dover Street Market in January, and is now manifesting as an early Noughties skinny-jeaned, pointy-shoed indie rocker.
In fact, though, the designer’s been dabbling in music since fall 2022, when he cut a souvenir vinyl record with his friend Tom Furse of the Horrors. So in a way, yesterday’s fashion and music session was a kind of reunion (Furse brought the muses together), or to put it another way, an amplification of the brand’s roots in putting on a performance and making a lot of noise about it.
The collaboration with Abbey Road Studios, Jeffrey said, took the form of sifting through the extraordinary archives with his team, looking at photos of artists and musicians who made legendary albums and movie soundtracks, beginning in the 1930s and famously taking in the Beatles in the ’60s, to the present. Stuff has changed for this major cultural institution, though, what with digital technology meaning kids can create and record music on their laptops. So now, it seems, collaborative links are being forged with new-generation thought-leaders like Jeffrey.
He was talking this over ‘backstage,’ in front of a giant mixing desk. “Kate Bush mixed her album in here! And the Beatles recorded exactly where we are in Studio One today.” Positioning his brand as music-adjacent is just a commercially useful extension to reach further into the international markets that he’s been growing organically, he said, as he ticked off K-Pop fans, rappers in North America, and Japanese ‘Anglomania’ customers on his fingers. “I have to expand and put my roots in places that feel authentic. Fashion is an art form that people can create from any inspiration, but it can also indulge in expressing itself in other spaces as well.”
But anyway, how did all of that influence this season’s looks? “I was listening to some of the tracks recorded at Abbey Road. I always listen to music when I’m designing,” Jeffrey said. He described it as a form of synesthesia , the condition where sound can be visualized as shapes or colors. Perhaps there was something sound-wavy going on on the giant cable knit mini-dresses, the flared trumpet-y trousers, or the flipped-out curled hem of a gold glitter dress which was perhaps a meeting of a ’50s crooner’s cocktail dress and a banana?
The banana became a CJL emblem and in-joke when he put a pair of banana boots—a tribute to the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly—into his fall 2024 collection. It’s been the same with the business in cute animal character beanies, woolly crowns, and sailor caps which Jeffrey started to play with just for fun around 2022. That’s now a major category for his brand today, plus the knitwear, which this season includes a souvenir sweater with a big violin on its front. After over 10 years on the scene, these are the riffs that Jeffrey happily keeps playing.
