“Fashion Is Oxygen”: Christopher Kane And Lena Dunham Reveal The Designer’s Next Chapter

Something electrifying happens when Christopher Kane and Lena Dunham are in the same room. The creatives, who struck up a friendship after the designer dressed Dunham and her Girls co-star Jemima Kirke for 2019’s Camp-themed Met Gala, are a conversational tour de force, zipping from the importance of family and friendship in fashion to the power of being a provocateur both on and off the runway – and thus made the perfect booking for Vogue’s Forces of Fashion London line-up.

Talk on the stage at Central Saint Martins, where Kane cut his teeth, turns immediately to Kane’s second commission from Dunham: not one, but three playful yet personal bridal dresses for her 2021 wedding to Luis Felber. Reminiscing about the celebration in Soho’s Union Club, Kane, who at the time said he was more “bridezilla” than the bride, recalls the mammoth task of making nine additional bridesmaid looks for a celeb-heavy contingent, including Taylor Swift and Tommy Dorfman, who flew in just one day before the wedding for fittings: “The aisle became a runway,” recalls Dunham, whose desire was to look likes a modern-day, subversive-yet-coquettish Priscilla Presley, and said that each Christopher Kane dress gave her a role to play.

Kane, once a major highlight on the London Fashion Week schedule, is well-versed in creating drama, recalling his 2006 graduate CSM collection shaped by his love of Fashion TV (a lifeline for a youngster growing up in the tiny village of Newarthill in Scotland) and infused with the naughty notions of womanhood that quickly became Christopher Kane hallmarks – ones that, indeed, attracted the attention of Donatella Versace, who invited him to consult on her relaunched Versus line in 2010 and Han Chong, who booked Kane as Self-Portrait’s resident collaborator for 2024.

The latter has proved something of a lifeline for the designer’s designer, who’s become an important tastemaker pushing us to consider what actually constitutes good taste, but has struggled in a tough economic climate and was forced to shutter his label last year. “People always see [fashion] as Ab Fab, people always dumb it down, and it really annoys me, because it’s so much hard work from the bottom to the top – everyone’s on their hands and knees making it work and [they] truly believe in it,” shares Kane. “I don’t see it as a failure, I see it as the next chapter. Pain equals joy… more joy.”