A Glitchy Backstage Look at Antipodium's SS15 Collection

It’s Saturday morning and I’m stood inside the Swiss Church in Covent Garden, with waiters serving boozy margaritas and single spoonfuls of avocado and chocolate mousse. A selection of very grumpy-looking models in neon zip-up dresses and sports sandals are stood under massive glowing orbs that float among the 19th-century ecclesiastical architecture.

‘One of them looks a little manly,’ I think to myself, before finding out later that, indeed, that model is a man – or, more specifically, a very beautiful boy named Stav Strashko. There’s a soundtrack of dark, overblown pop like Kylie’s “Confide In Me” Röyksopp and Robyn’s “Monument”, mixed by Rory Phillips for the occasion.

This is Antipodium’s SS15 presentation. It’s called "Women On a Mission", and according to head designer Daniel Mcilwraith it’s about “the emotional motivations that drive us to worship at the shrine of fashion”, which might explain why the showcase is being held in a very tasteful Swiss church – a church that has its own Twitter account and retweets Wallpaper* magazine.

Daniel was inspired by astronauts, late-night switchboard operators and televangelists, specifically 1980s middle-American televangelist Tammy Faye Messner. So much so, in fact, that he’s commissioned artist (and regular VICE illustrator) Victoria Sin to design an unsettling Tammy Faye print, all disembodied, lipsticked mouths and mascara-smeared eyes staring out at us from crispy cotton poplin and silk.

“She was quite hysterical, and her and her husband were quite notorious for not practicing what they preached,” says Daniel. “They lived a very extravagant lifestyle.”

With that, I venture into the tiny backstage and find my friend Margaret Crow, who’s styling the show. She tells me she hasn’t slept and that she fell down some stairs this morning, but is still in excellent spirits. The handsome model I was puzzling over wanders in, so I follow him downstairs to watch him undress while and ask him some questions about why he’s modelling in a womenswear presentation.

Stav is 21 and comes from Ukraine. “I was always quite feminine and I was never thinking of modelling,” he tells me in a surprisingly gravelly accent. “I always had a vision that I was going to be, maybe, an actor or a singer – something glamorous!”

He’s standing in a wardrobe under the church while two young ladies pull his very tight trousers down around his ankles. I've been told that Stav looks like Cara Delevingne, so I ask him what he thinks of that. He says: “People tell me so. We have some similarities, but we’re quite different!”

It's hard to argue with that, and I'm not sure why anyone would really want to, so I leave him and the rest of the models to it.

Click through to see more photos from the Antipodium presentation.

@deankissick / freelandgorse.tumblr.com