WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS: BACKSTAGE LFW

Visitors to Lower Stable Street this spring will be transported to the east London of the late 2000s with an exhibition of intimate archive images of the era’s it girls and boys backstage at London Fashion Week.

WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS: BACKSTAGE LFW features images taken in 2007 and 2009 by acclaimed photographer Rebecca Zephyr Thomas. The exhibition looks back to a key moment in British fashion, and forward to this year’s edition of London Fashion Week, the 40th anniversary of the event, which runs 16 - 20 February 2024.

The models in this collection of photos -among them Agyness Deyn, Alice Dellal, Ash Stymest, Luke Worrall - exemplify the quirky, rock and roll attitude that sets LFW apart, a new generation of faces that represented a very British fashion take on youth culture and rebellion.

The photographs were shot backstage at Fashion East and Giles Deacon shows, and include images from legendary early showings by Henry Holland and future star Martine Rose. Fashion East was set up by Lulu Kennedy in 2000 to champion fresh new designers and has launched the careers of some of Britain’s brightest fashion talents.

Incredibly, the 2007 photos were Thomas’s first time shooting LFW, which she went on to cover for nearly a decade. “At the start I wasn't allowed to even shoot the clothes - at Giles I was there to photograph the beauty looks but had to leave before the models got changed, I was pretty low on the photography rung! These photos show my starting place, shooting on 35mm film in a very documentary manner. Now I'm actually pleased that I was shooting the models in their own clothes as it shows a real slice of the backstage chaos in all its glory, and what real people were wearing off duty.”

These pictures take an offbeat look at London Fashion Week in the late 2000s, a hugely influential era that combined the indie sleaze energy of home-grown talents like Dellal and Deyn with big-name, high glamour supermodels including Mariacarla Boscono and Raquel Zimmerman.

Rebecca Zephyr Thomas’s photography features extensive documentation of music and fashion subcultures in and around the east London area. Collections include We Are Your Friends and What Would Julia Do, a long-term photographic series on London nightlife legend Princess Julia.

Exhibition opens 12th February 2024

Lower Stable Street, Kings Cross, N1C 

FREE