Fashion Review: The Meghan Markle Non-Effect

LONDON — Where’s Meghan Markle when you need her?

Helping to raise money for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire via a new cookbook, apparently, and shrugging off the public’s pregnancy obsession. Admirable enough. But where’s the influence we all thought was coming: The reverberations from a thoroughly nontraditional royal, a woman who upended tight-lipped wedding protocol to orchestrate an event that changed expectations about everything the word “princess” (or even “duchess”) could mean?

Not at London Fashion Week. Not in any obvious way, that is.

There were some echoes of a revolution in female identity on a few catwalks. And women’s history was clearly on a number of designer minds, whether the end product was seen via a computer, as I viewed some collections before I arrived, or in person.

But aside from the surprise appearance of Rose McGowan leading an army of female hackers in sci-fi tech bootees and cantilevered cyber-wedges at Nicholas Kirkwood (Heels as the weapon of the #MeToo resistance! Why not?), the clothes weren’t really about how to dress for the future. Instead, they seemed preoccupied by the past. Also animal sex and string theory (the dangling kind). More on that later.

At Erdem, for example, a précis on every seat told a story about two 19th-century cross-dressers who proved “self-expression was not a crime” and inspired a host of quasi-Victorian day dresses in elongated lace and tulle and blurry, watercolor florals topped by long moire bows (at the shoulders, the spine, the throat), veiled hats and elbow-length gloves. There were some nods to modern exigencies in the form of houndstooth trouser suits in the same lean, puff-sleeved silhouette and a flirtation with the question of gender identification (those veils hid boys as well as girls), but the mood was almost spectrally mysterious.

Indeed, bows, trains, veils and capes — the accessories most associated with the ghosts of femininity long ago — were a peculiar leitmotif of the season. Big, sweeping bows made another appearance at Emilia Wickstead, interrupting the parade of executive basics with a giant apple-green ribbon that backed a long pink sheath, not to mention Princess Margaret caps bedecked with slightly smaller versions at the base of the skull; so did capes, which were rendered seemingly sleeveless in layers of sparkling magenta tulle or volumetric florals. There were trains and more bows, this time in velvet, at Roksanda, in an otherwise earthy exploration of nomadic ease.

And veils shadowed Simone Rocha’s posy-speckled bubble tulle twist on her Chinese heritage, featuring paintings of Tang dynasty concubines sourced from Hong Kong flea markets — “imitations of imitations,” she said backstage — all offset by cool culottes and belted jackets.

The effect was romantic and quirky and charmingly melancholy, which is her signature. But they still had an air of costume drama, as did Richard Quinn’s diamond-sprinkled roses and leopard print whistle-stop tour through the cocktail dresses of the decades (though perhaps he could be forgive for having Windsors seemingly on the mind; Queen Elizabeth did attend his last show). Yet “The Crown,” with Claire Foy’s recent Emmy Award notwithstanding, if the palace has moved on, shouldn’t we?

Matty Bovan did, in a riotous pastiche of kitchen-table pouffery. So did Hussein Chalayan, in a swing through time and regional values, from the Roman abduction of Sabine women to Eastern protectionism (his words, via some show notes), where thankfully the portentous starting points were lightened up into something more abstract and compelling: jackets pulled off the shoulders; dresses cinched at the side; collars stretched into points that dripped down the shoulders. It was more modern than the lamé-in-a-tiki-bar celebrations of 1970s louche luxe at Peter Pilotto. But it wasn’t until Christopher Kane that any real sense of the provocation of female strength and rule-breaking was put on show.

In recent seasons, Mr. Kane has gone down something of a sex rabbit hole, a focus that veered into the sophomoric, but here it was subtle enough (Just ignore the “sexual cannibalism” T-shirt featuring a pair of preying mantises; the “Foreplay” sweats with two cheetahs) to provide an additive frisson to deconstructed lace boning that suggested skeletal structures as much as corsetry, jutting power shoulders and gray sweater dressing handcuffed in Swarovski.

Maybe the problem is the continuing, understandable preoccupation with the country’s departure from the European Union, a.k.a. Brexit, which seems to have everyone in a holding pattern waiting to see what comes next. “It’s all anyone wants to talk about in interviews,” Stephanie Phair, the new chairwoman of the British Fashion Council, lamented before a show of up-and-coming designers at Fashion East full of ties that bound: arms, torsos, busts. There’s a reason the collections ended with a reception hosted by Prime Minister Theresa May at 10 Downing Street to “celebrate British fashion and international trade.”

You can grapple with the present, with collage and patchwork and the question of how we all fit together, as Mary Katrantzou did with her opulent mosaics of print and polygons for her 10th anniversary, and Duro Olowu did in his butterflies-meet-florals-meets-tiger stripes, bias-meets-art-world silks. You can address it as JW Anderson did, by eschewing glamour for the humanity of the everyday, and reinventing shirting, suits and shift dresses with asymmetry, crochet and craft.

But you can’t really design for a future you can’t imagine. No matter how potentially inspiring a wedding.