From London, With Love.(London, England-based fashion designers Jonathan Saunders and Christopher Kane)(Interview)

Byline: Photographed by Norman Jean Roy.

Two young Glasgow-bred designers, Jonathan Saunders and Christopher Kane, have launched themselves--and their new city--into fashion's limelight. Sarah Mower celebrates.

JONATHAN SAUNDERS

Lauded for his clever applications of print and linear proportion, he's now taking his show to the States.

Jonathan Saunders is on his way to New York. "I feel a bit sad about not showing in London, where there's such a support system," he says. "But a new experience is starting for me. Learning about America has been a great exercise in focusing who I am as a designer." At 30, Saunders isn't leaving his adopted home base in London but just preparing to show in New York. It's a big step, and a risk for any young designer (homegrown or foreign), but Saunders isn't quite arriving on a wing and a prayer. Last year, American reaction to his linear, graphic, colorful aesthetic was so positive, he's pushing on a door that's at least half open.

His natural affinity with the pared-down modernity in the American psyche is not something Saunders could have recognized in himself five years ago. When he started his collection a year out of the fashion masters program at Central Saint Martins, he'd never been to America; it was only when he was invited to the AngloMania gala at the Met in May 2006 that he set foot in New York for the first time. Following a breakthrough fall collection, he found himself flown to Dallas by Neiman Marcus, feted in New York at a private dinner thrown by Bergdorf Goodman, and invited to Boston to visit Louis Boston.

The point about Saunders's design is the way he brings a nontraditional, concise elegance to print and color--the kind of imprint that makes a statement at a distance across a department-store floor. "What women tell me is that print doesn't always equate to a flattering silhouette, but they get that in my clothes." His sharp eye for bold combinations--contrasting pastels, this time, with bands of black--comes this season from the palette of Ettore Sottsass's Memphis collective and an Irving Penn photograph of colored blocks. "But my work's not referential," he says. "I don't do themes. The way I use sources is never literal."