Just when you thought Henry Holland had swapped sewing machines for pottery wheels for good, the Ramsbottom-born designer has proved he has at least one more slogan tee in him.
The story goes that, back in 2006, before a night out at Boombox, Holland, then a fashion editor, and his best friend from home, Agyness Deyn, designed four provocative slogan T-shirts in his Chalk Farm flat: “Cause me pain Hedi Slimane”, “Do me daily Christopher Bailey”, “Uhu Gareth Pugh” and “Get your freak on Giles Deacon”. Those rhymes earned Holland a spot in Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East spring/summer 2007 line-up and an order for 1,300 T-shirts from Barneys in New York, catapulting him to international fame in the process.
One of House of Holland’s signature slogan tees, worn by Behati Prinsloo on the Fashion East runway, in February 2007.
Holland’s one-liner T-shirts – half sexual innuendo, half fashion-insider reference (remember “I’ve got more than a handful for Naomi Campbell”?) – soon became a prerequisite for nights out at Soho’s White Heat in the mid-Noughties, worn with now-shudder-inducing fluorescent American Apparel leggings, skinny ties and a concerning amount of backcombing and hairspray. In the run-up to London Fashion Week, the British team is already feeling fairly nostalgic for those times (remember the mini fish pies at the Topshop show space in Holland’s heyday?), and so, it seems, is Charli xcx.
Last night, to open the Brooklyn dates of her tour, the former cover star channelled the indie-sleaze era in a House of Holland latex T-shirt dress emblazoned with the words “I’ve had sex with Charli xcx”, paired with fishnets and killer heels. What better choice for a tour dedicated to the sort of guitar-heavy bangers Holland would have heard when dreaming up those career-defining tees? “If I could have dreamt up a more ideal scenario for bringing back my slogans (even if just for a one off) then I could not have pictured anything more perfect,” Holland wrote on Instagram. No one lasts forever? We respectfully disagree.
