There’s always a narrative behind my collections. This one’s about a Royal Air Force  kid who, because of his family moving from base to base, doesn’t really have a true foundation in life – there’s no sense of home. It made me think about growing up in Shropshire where we had an army base a couple of miles up the road. At the beginning of each school term, there would be a bunch of new kids who we befriended, but they always had to move on and it was quite heartbreaking, especially for them. The collection is about that nomadic kid who’s trying to find his home, a sense of stability and a place where he belongs.

In the narrative, the RAF pilot dad has this idea that the son wants to follow in his footsteps. But actually, the son doesn’t want to do that. Although he’s fascinated with the machines and the technology behind the planes, he doesn’t want to fly them. He ends up going to art school but he still admires the machines, technology, mechanics of the aviation industry. The result is this dark undercurrent of being a misfit trying to fit in, attempting to find stability – and I think it’s something we can all relate to.

I was very adamant that if we were sticking with this RAF association, it had to feel contemporary. After last season, I felt that we had to keep on pushing forward. I don’t want the brand to be pigeonholed. I’ve been inspired by uniforms before, but this time around I wanted something lighter and more relaxed. There is tailoring in this collection but it has a slightly more boxy fit. They’re made from the same block I normally use, but they’re a lot easier to wear.

The art school story is visible in some of the tailoring as well, a sort of idea of homespun creativity; you can see it in the shrivelled, painter scrub linen jackets. They’re made so that the interior becomes the exterior – I wanted to show the construction process and engineering that goes into making them. They look like they could have been worn either by an artist in his studio or a mechanic doing up a plane. I really like the dirty-looking coat, it looks like it’s got tea stains on it. And we’ve continued the western style jackets. There is even one in terry cloth which I’m yet to decide upon – but the fabric makes sense in home furnishing kind of way. The collection is about an art school kid who rebels against life as we knows it and, along the process, finds himself and his identity.

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Because you lured a girl of 15 to deceive her parents on a wintry-dark December school day, 1953.
Because you lured this girl to lie about where she was going, what she was doing, in the most reckless act of her young life.
Because you lured this girl to take a Greyhound bus from Williamsville, New York to downtown Buffalo, New York, alone in the wintry dusk, as she had not ever been alone in her previous life.
Because you lured this girl shivering, daring to step onto the bus in front of Williamsville High School at 4:55 pm to be taken 12 miles to the small shabby second-run Main Street Cinema for a 6 pm showing of The Wild One – a place that would’ve been forbidden, if the girl’s parents had known.
What might have happened! – by chance, did not happen.

Because inside the Main Street Cinema were rows of seats near-empty in the dark, commingled smells of stale popcorn and cigarette smoke – (for this was an era when there was “smoking in the loge”), and on the screen the astonishing magnified figure of “Johnny” in black leather jacket, opaque dark sunglasses, on his motorcycle exuding the sulky authority of the young predator male.

Because when asked what you were rebelling against you said with wonderful disdain, What’ve you got?
Because that was our answer too, that we had not such words to utter.

Because you were the consummate rapist, with the swagger of the rapist enacting the worst brute will of the audience.

Because you were Terry Malloy, the screen filled with your battered boy’s face.
Because sweetness and hurt were conjoined in that face.
Because you took up the glove dropped by Eva Marie Saint, and put it on your hand, appropriating the blond Catholic girl and wearing her like a glove.

Because you exposed your soul in yearning – I could’ve been a contender! – knowing how defeat, failure, ignominy would be your fate.

Because in 1955 at the age of 31, after having won an Academy Award for On the Waterfront, you were interviewed by Edward R Murrow wreathed in cigarette smoke like a shroud and in your rented stucco house in the hills above Los Angeles already you were speaking of trying to be “normal”.  Because you endured the interviewer’s lame questions – “Have you discovered that success can have its own problems?” – “Are you planning a long career as an actor?”
Because you conceded, “I can’t do anything else well.”
Because you said you wanted to sing and dance on screen, you wanted to be “superficial” – you wanted to “entertain.”
Because on the mantel of the rented house was a portrait of your mother at 40, your alcoholic mother who’d failed to love you enough.

And in a drunken parody of tango you were unexpectedly light on your feet, radiant in playfulness, clowning, in mockery of the heightened emotions and sexual drama of tango – as in your youth you’d wanted to be “superficial” and to “entertain” –
And then, lowering your trousers and baring your buttocks in the exhilaration of contempt.
Because the actor does not exist, if he is not the center of attention.  Because the actor’s heart is an emptiness, no amount of adulation can fill.

Because after the slapstick-tango you lay curled in the exhaustion of grief and in the muteness of grief, a fetal corpse on a balcony in greylit Paris.

In Hell, there is tango.  The other dancers dance on.

Because you made of self-loathing a caprice of art.
Because what was good in you, your social conscience, your generosity to liberal causes, was swallowed up in the other.
Because you squandered yourself in a sequence of stupid films as if in defiance of your talent and of our expectations of that talent.
Because by late middle-age you’d lived too long.