Bleak yet beautiful: Williams' collection
Bel Jacobs|Metro13 April 2012

Bleakly neutral in colour, beautifully savage in cut, the clothes of Robert Cary Williams inspire a unique awe.

Individual items have just enough structure to hint at familiar worlds - weddings, cocktail parties, club nights and country walks - before they're blasted by an armoury of physical forces; 'beauty with an undercurrent of violence' wrote one devotee.

Autumn 2003 offers aged chiffon T-shirts, stained with tea and printed with letters from a mental hospital; fragile dresses are ripped with scissors, then embellished with sequins and safety pins.

Inspired by Williams's years in the military, the men's 'shot' T-shirts - army T-shirts blasted with a rifle to create a splatter of tiny holes - have already won cult status; this season, they're joined by a new menswear collection featuring army jackets painted with the ghosts of leather braces. The adventure continues...

Tel: 020 7434 4333.

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