Meadham Kirchhoff: 'A Wolf in Lamb's Clothing'

The figure of the 'woman­-child' appears time and time again in the field of British fashion. Caught somewhere between the discursive domains of childhood and womanhood, the 'girl' has vast and malleable symbolic connotations. She has been used at different historical moments to symbolise something beyond herself: modernity and progress; freedom and financial independence; pessimism and so­called heroin chic. But what does the 'woman­-child' represent today, following three (or even four) waves of feminism? This question is unravelled here through discussion of Meadham Kirchhoff's Spring/Summer 2012 collection, 'A Wolf In Lamb's Clothing'.