Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY’s Utopian Fantasy

In 2014, Glaswegian designer Charles Jeffrey became fashion’s darling in a nondescript basement club on Dalston Highstreet.

His Loverboy club night, held in Vogue Fabrics, was inspired by the debaucherous establishments Taboo and Blitz of the 1970s and was a “no-rules nocturnal laboratory” that attracted London’s club kids dressed in DIY drag or decoratively doused in paint.

With club at its core, Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY is recognizable by clashing Scottish tartans and graphic knits and has been heralded as “speaking to young London the way Alexander McQueen spoke to his generation” by Tim Blanks. In 2017, Jeffrey won the British Fashion Award for Best Emerging Menswear and, in 2018, the GQ Award for Emerging Designer.

LOVERBOY’s most recent collection, “The Curious Case of Moshkirk & Booness,” showed off-schedule in Paris this January. In comparison to past productions, AW-24 was a lowkey affair, comprising of a film—shot on Tilda Swinton’s highland estate and narrated by Scottish actor Alan Cumming—set in the fictional village of Moshkirk, Scotland, which, the story goes, had been isolated, both in space and time, by a freak meteor strike in 1979. The small-town affair turned into a club night of its own, with the models dressed in post-punk, no wave inspired designs and dancing to a song of Jeffrey’s making. This upcoming June, LOVERBOY will celebrate its tenth birthday with an exhibition and performance at Somerset House in London. Here, Bethany Wright talks to the designer about his music venture, the unsung scene of 2007, and Jonathan Anderson as the leader of the new era of business designers.

BETHANY WRIGHT: How do you build the narratives for your collections?

CHARLES JEFFREY: I start by writing a story where I build fantastical worlds and characters. For the most recent collection, we skewed my usual creative direction and began by writing a piece of music. “The Curious Case of Moshkirk & Booness” (AW-24) is set in a fictional village of Moshkirk, Scotland where the inhabitants have been stuck in time since 1979 and in Paris we showed the collection through a music video, which I performed in. “New Caroleans” (SS-24) played with dress codes of the 1600s Carolean society and modernized them in the context of a new Carolean era, under King Charles III. The collection offered a utopian version of monarchism––one that celebrated queerness and was free from patriarchy. “The Engine Room” (AW-23), which was inspired by the John Byrne’s plays The Slab Boys, took place in a “Sky City.”

Storytelling is the vehicle we use to develop characters. We think about where they live, what they eat and drink, and what they listen to. It creates a stream of creativity to develop prints and silhouettes and build details––especially in terms of our data-led pieces, where we recycle designs that have performed well in the past. The story takes my team on a nice journey, and it springs artistry into reiterations.

BW: How have you developed your shows’ theatrics and concepts as the brand grows commercially?

CJ: We are in the era of designers, such as Jonathan Anderson, who are great at sales and business. Anderson has that fine balance between creativity and commerce. He’s doing a frog shoe and a pigeon bag, and people still want to buy it. We are in an era where that is the superstar. But because of that, there has been a complete drought in personality, and it is something we have felt as a brand too. However, with the recent Maison Margiela by John Galliano show, we could be entering a turning point. It blew everyone away and people have been reminded of what fashion can be about.

In the beginning, we were excited to have the stage, it was fun to experiment and perform. Our LFW debut “darling little sillies” (2019) was inspired by Galliano and the story of Peter Pan. We were the darling of the fashion world for a second. But there has been a conversation about pausing things to bring people’s attention to the clothing, hence we have divorced from performatism in the most recent shows.

Parallel to this subtler approach, we began releasing music videos for marketing, in-store collections, and e-commerce. I find it has more substance than other forms of brand outreach, and it adds another element of creativity that works alongside this foray of being more capital focused on the runway. I’m not trying to be a musician, but when approaching the shows’ music, I was obsessive to the point where I thought, “Why am I not doing it?”

We initiated me as a performer in the Wedgwood project, last year. It was an opportunity for me to posture and play with what I looked like. My character as a performer wears a wig and is both audibly and visually inspired by my favorite bands, The Beatles and The Horrors. There is a freedom to the music that reminds me of when I was doing the club night during my MA. In comparison, the night was so unserious, yet in the end it was the element that made LOVERBOY recognizable and was essential to its evolution into a brand. I don’t know if that will happen with the music, it is purely a joyous thing and quite detached from any money-making capabilities.

BW: When your brand captured the industry’s attention through the Loverboy club nights, nightlife was central to the aesthetic. Would you say that is still the case?

CJ: I do not go out or party as I used to. I enjoyed my 20s, I took everything, went out all the time, and managed to maintain my brand—that was the romantic era of it all. In 2023, I was sober for the whole year and it was an important time for me to tighten up, to work out how to be a boss and creative director, and handle everything that comes with owning a brand—the marketing, finance, retail, sales, merchandising, legal, and interviews. I needed the clarity to be able to do all these things without also dealing with a hangover or lack of sleep. I was able to bolster my confidence in my approach and it brewed all these new creative approaches—such as, storytelling and music. I look back at videos of myself when I was caning it and having fun two or three years ago and I know that that Charles would never have put a wig on and performed on stage. He wouldn’t have had the confidence.

That said, the language of nightlife is enwrapped in our design process, whether that relates to the club aesthetic, gender proposal, or the attitude towards a decision-making process in designing a tartan or a clashing color scheme—which comes from visualizing a costumer who takes an immediate approach to the idea of night. We think of the peacock, those who want to attract or be esoteric. All these identities exist organically in LOVERBOY and stem from being trained within a nightlife space; operating and living as a character within that realm.

People have asked me to do the club night again, but club nights are only relevant in the pockets of time they originated from. When you look back at most famous night clubs, such as The Blitz or Studio 54, they all take place for around one or two years. The excitement has to do with the group of people it attracts. If I revisited the Loverboy night, it would be a parody of itself.

BW: There is a lot of nostalgia for the club nights you mentioned. What do you think is missing from our current cultural scene that keeps us looking back?

CJ: My exhibition at Somerset House highlights the 2007 era. It was an interesting time when the Highstreet was so connected to music, subculture, and NME. H&M and Topman were doing the Hedi Slimane look, so if you didn’t have much money, you could buy a pair of Topman shoes on sale for ten Pounds, Primark skinny jeans, and style your hair like Patrick Wolf. When I was dreaming up the exhibition, I asked myself: Do I want to include a Warhol piece? No! I thought, “Let’s get an outfit from Topman next to the Madonna Crystal Castles t-shirt and a pair of Winklepicker shoes.”

What’s missing now is that nothing feels like a subculture. When I was a teenager, I would look at pictures of London club nights. At the kids who were going to BoomBox and Taboo, like [designer] Gareth Pugh, all the dirty dancing, and the no wave magazine DISORDER. It was unrequited romanticism because I couldn’t be in contact with it from my small town in Scotland.

Now, everything is democratized, everybody has access, even if not physically. Things are really watered down.

BW: Thinking about the effect of social media, there have been “moments” including the Coperni spray on dress and the Galliano show—both of which were objectively successful and had longevity due to their virality. How do you consider the longevity of the performative aspects of your brand?

CJ: In terms of that Galliano show, I think he has been gearing up to that for the past five seasons. In his second season for Maison Margiela, for instance, the models were wearing neon makeup and walking in an obscured way midway through the show, which nods to the theatrics seen in SS-24. The way in which we are building the music into our marketing and shows is teetering on this tactic of enhancing elements of creativity season by season. Originally, I made the music for a collaboration and then integrated it into a collection output.

It’s a new element for us. As we lean into a commerciality, the music works to bring things back into equilibrium. It is defiantly different. What designer is performing live on stage next to their clothes? Outside of Yohji Yamamoto playing guitar many moons ago. Vivienne [Westwood] walking down her own runway show—even though it was designed by Andreas [Kronthaler]. Galliano coming out of every catwalk at Dior. John Paul Gaultier doing that “How To Do That” video. These are all things that validate me doing what I want to do.

BW: There is always the question of gender fluidity with your brand. I had to laugh when you said, “this is such an eyeroll conversation” when someone asked you about it in another interview. Nevertheless, it is a conversation your brand engages with. One of the lyrics in the “Moshkirk” song, for instance, reads: “I’m not a boy, I’m not a man. I’m a lover.”

CJ: This venture into writing is completely new to me. I never thought I’d be a writer and arguably I’m not a good one. I remember someone saying, “Writing is just a drawing, most people cannot draw but they make art anyway.” As soon as I saw it like that, it became a more feasible skill for me to have. Then I started to understand how my voice works and do things in a postpunk way, how to sound like The Cramps or Echo and the Bunnymen.

“I am not a boy,

I am not I man,

I am a nuclear bomb,

And I am ready to drop.”

I was happy to own that because it relates to our message. There is a relationship between those lyrics and where I’m at with the business. I’m no longer the rise to the top darling that I was. I’m not a Jonathan yet. I’m still in between. More than anything else, this is what it speaks to.

BW: Jonathan Anderson is a big inspiration for you. Do you want to take on a creative director role at some point?

CJ: It was an interesting time for me when the creative director position opened at Moschino. Jeremy Scott resigned, and they hired the former head of womenswear at Gucci, Davide Renne, who then sadly died ten days after starting the role. During this timeline of events, people were asking me: “Are you going to be the director of Moschino?” and tagging me in posts. It was never a position I had thought about but Franco Moschino did a lot in terms of politics, health, and parodying fashion. He was politically active in the work. People see it as a teddy bear dress, but he was a punk at the very beginning. An anarchist, who was taking the piss out of LVMH, Gucci, and Versace. He was getting sued, but he was commercially successful. He was an amazingly talented businessman and designer.

Now Moschino have appointed Adrian Appiolaza as creative director who has worked for Chloé, Loewe, Marc Jacobs, Miu Miu under Miuccia Prada, Louis Vuitton, and Jonathan Anderson. This is evocative of the interesting switch in the assignment of creative directors. When I was at university, you would start your own label, have your McQueen era, and then you were hired by a big brand because they looked at what you did with your own label. That is not the case anymore. Recently, all these major appointments have depended on the brands you’ve worked for, the portfolio of companies you’ve been exposed to, and the level of success of those companies—which influenced you as their employee.

I have been approached by companies before, but they mostly felt random. I’ve also been asked, hypothetically, if I would want to take over Vivienne Westwood, but honestly, I wouldn’t. Vivienne Westwood needs to be led by a woman. I have a very specific viewpoint on fashion because I’m a man. I love her work so much, but she was a woman who thought about women and sex, and who designed with both in mind.

But yes, I would like to go into another creative director role at some point. Maybe something’s happening. No one really knows right now, and I’m not going to say anything!