From Glory Holes to Green Juice

Eliza Holland on Charles Jeffrey and growing up without selling out

Charles Jeffrey’s show at Somerset House in June was the indisputable highlight of London Fashion Week, with Beth Ditto closing the event singing a rendition of Gloria. In this op ed from our archive, Eliza Holland reflects on the evolution of a brand with radical roots - and whether a nascent fashion house can ever scale without cleaning up too hard.

It’s a Saturday night in 2014 and London’s getting ready to go out. But this dressing-up montage doesn’t feature stilettos or bodycon dresses; rather, metre-long headpieces, full body glitter, latex gimp suits and the occasional suit of armour. Amid the sea of gyrating limbs you might even catch a glimpse of LOVERBOY’s own impresario, drenched in sweat and electric blue body paint: Charles Jeffrey. What began as an empty slot at Dalston’s Vogue Fabrics and Jeffrey’s own birthday bash quickly snowballed into LOVERBOY, a monthly celebration of all that is gaudy, hedonistic, and queer. With themes like hell, porn, and gum, the LOVERBOY club nights promised a parade of the gauche and outrageous. 

It was these club nights that helped fund Jeffrey’s MA at Central Saint Martins, from which point the Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY brand took hold. Nightlife supported Jeffrey at once financially and creatively, serving as primary research for his own collections. Of course, this was not the first time CSM fashion students made a name for themselves on the London club scene. In the fifties it was The Whisky-A-Go-Go that played host to these preened peacocks, followed by Blitz and Leigh Bowery’s Taboo. ‘The Saint Martins fashion student,’ writes Iain R Webb, ‘is renowned as a cultural clubber who by nature and nurture wishes to challenge the status quo and explore ideals of glamour, sexuality and taste via their wardrobe.’ But it is with Charles Jeffrey that the club really collides with the catwalk. Jeffrey’s models are his own friends, the bright young things populating Vogue Fabrics during LOVERBOY’s heyday, and the same queer community brings about each collection.

‘Everyone contributed and created work during the nights, be it in the construction of sets, image capture, performance, and so the collaborative way in which we work in the firm was born. The nights became primary research for my design work. We were inspired by the way people dressed in the club, and that fed everything else,’ he told HIGHXTAR. 

In recent years, Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY has shot to household-name status, and the club kid is all grown up. Increasingly, Jeffrey is having to navigate a middle way between the DIY ethos of the early club days and the neat finishings demanded from an established brand. Jeffrey strives to maintain a sense of the handmade which attracted so many to his work back when he was alone in the studio, telling Bliss Foster: ‘Now obviously it’s a lot more formalised but what I try and always do is find a link between that DIY, tangible starting point I always had and how that can be translated into the fabrics.’ Impeccably cut suits share the same stage as guernsey jumpers slashed apart and re-stitched haphazardly to reveal bursts of colour beneath.

Growing up in the shadow of Vivienne Westwood, Charles Jeffrey may well have looked to his predecessor for tips on how to commercialise a brand that is, sartorially speaking, anti commercial. Westwood’s first shop, SEX, set up with then-boyfriend, the Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, was decidedly anti-retail, with opaque windows and slippery opening hours. Famously, McLaren declared, ‘Making money was never even a goal.’ But when money did become, if not a goal, then at least a possibility, Westwood began to turn away from the sex shop and towards the art gallery for inspiration. The infamous Pirate show of 1981 marked a conspicuous separation from McLaren, not only on the personal level, but also the aesthetic. ‘Hobble’ straps around the thighs became the ‘mini-crini,’ while ‘nippled’ graphic tees flattened out into corsetry and a jagged shirt gaping with safety pins could now be described as distressed. 

However, this is a slightly more difficult track to follow for a brand so self-identified as emerging from queer nightlife. The Spring/Summer 2020 collection, shown in the British Library and featuring perhaps the most conservatively commercial pieces to ever walk the LOVERBOY runway, was seen by some of Jeffrey’s following as a betrayal of the harder-to-swallow aspects of the brand. After all, when just anyone (well, anyone willing to shell out £150 on a beret) can buy their way into the Charles Jeffrey brand, where does this leave the LOVERBOY community? Just like the clubs which serve as a breeding ground for so much talent, the business’ success comes at the price of alienating the intended queer clientele. Kacion Mayers, editorial director at Dazed, was not alone in calling for an exploration of queerness throughout such aesthetic seriousness, ‘rather than just going down this academic, “I’m not just a club kid” route.’ 

While it is entirely understandable that Jeffrey resists this “club kid” label, interning at Dior’s haute couture atelier during the same years he was hosting the LOVERBOY nights, the club undoubtedly remains a sacred space for his queer community. An essential site for gender performance for so many decades, the club serves as an incubator for some of the most ferocious and fabulous creatures. It was at the club that performers like Lester La Mote and Peter Stackula were applauded for costumes fashioned from crepe paper or turning up as the dead Marilyn Monroe, clawing herself out from the grave in a white halter dress, blackened with dirt. Charles Jeffrey undoubtedly understands the burden of such a history and maintains that ‘it’s important for us to reflect on the fact that these places were places for us to grow and to develop and expand as queer people.’ For Jamie Windust, speaking to SHOWstudio, ‘initially Charles was one of the first designers that resonated so strongly with me because of that notion of queerness and because it was so unapologetic…’. 

As much as LOVERBOY’s ethos could be summed up as sweat, lust and glam, it is much more than just the froth and fun of going out. Really, LOVERBOY is about hope. The collections are spurred on by a frenetic, otherworldly, and even terrifying dynamism, frequently initiated by a group of dancers as if opening ritual festivities. At the SS22 “Portal” show, Jeffrey appealed directly to folkloric ideas of emerging into the light from the darkness of COVID. The models’ dancing exploded into ecstatic nonsense as they re-enacted Stravinsky’s rite of spring, and here, dance is more than just a release: it’s a mode of salvation. Charles Jeffrey’s recent work might appear as diluted or more commercial, but it is ushering in a new era for the designer, now moving into his 30s. The 2023 Spring collection – entitled PHWOARRR – sees Jeffrey approach the concept of queer wellness, a far cry from his early LOVERBOY days but no less valid. Jack Davey, the set designer for PHWOARRR sees it as ‘rethinking the notion of a hedonistic queer space as something fresh, comfortable and playful.’ 

This is Jeffrey’s response to those questioning the roadmap for the evolution of a queer brand. His models are still clad in sailor silhouettes and pin-up speedos, but now they are surrounded by green juice and citrus rather than smoke and MD. ‘It’s the opposite of what we’re known for,’ he told Vogue, ‘but it’s important to have conversations about safe spaces within the queer community that doesn’t just involve nightclubs…I’ve had my crazy, roaring 20s and now I want to exercise, sleep well, and feel healthy – it’s a different kind of awareness of the body that’s worth appreciating.’ Undoubtedly, youthful abandon and punk anarchy will always remain central to the brand, but as LOVERBOY evolves, we must learn to read the semiotics of queerness: the gauche dandyism of a seemingly conservative suit or the rebellion of staying in.