Charles Jeffrey Loverboy

Review of Charles Jeffrey Loverboy ‘Engine Room’ Fall 2023 Ad Campaign by Photographer Quil Lemons with models Søren Müller and Yiling Zhao

Charles Jeffrey Loverboy reimagines the aesthetic category of “steampunk” to subvert and rewrite fashion’s historical relationship with labor. The brand’s Fall 2023 campaign was shot by photographer Quil Lemons.

Titled “Engine Room,” the collection drew on the stories of turn-of-the-century United Kingdom’s industrial laborers, wandering through the gritty and gloomy world of locomotive operators and chimney sweeps, pimps, urchins, and street performers, all while putting a surreal and fantastical dystopian spin on these archetypes. In developing this world, Charles Jeffrey was in part influenced by the work of John Byrne, a Scottish dramatist and artist recognized for his bizarre universe of stories and visuals, which frequently highlight working-class lives and the power of creativity. Surreal artworks drawn from Byrne’s archives appear across the collection as well.

Lemons’ imagery largely lets the details of this narrative-focused collection – as well as the personalities of the performers who embody it – drive the visual identity of the campaign. Rather than building up the world through set design, the imagery shows us that the world unfolds as the clothing itself. Occupying a dark, bare space reminiscent of a black box theater, the characters take on a spectrum of personality and physical presence that is similarly theatrical. They laugh, they scream; they support one another, they fight.

Further pushing the campaign’s bodily building of a narrative dystopia, the art direction finishes off the images with diagrammatic labeling, categorizing the garments and the models’ body parts as elements in an archaic steam-powered vehicle or machine: a head is “THE COCKPIT,” a shin is “FALFE STEM,” a belted tank is “MIZZAN MAFT.”

Disarming and humorous, the clever visual conceit also solidifies the depth of thought behind this season’s concept. Fashion has a sort of love-hate relationship with labor and its history of exploitation; it both fetishizes the working class (consider fashion’s ongoing obsession with workwear and distressed clothing) and categorically excludes people on a financial basis. Rather than turning away from these difficult sociological issues, Charles Jeffrey Loverboy has used fashion to investigate its own paradoxes, exploring the way in which an aesthetic becomes culturally alienated from its own material origins – and perhaps inspiring us to imagine a future with a more equitable (but still very stylish) system of power.

The campaign confirms what the runway show (which was the brand’s Milan debut) suggested: that Charles Jeffrey is one of the most insightful and distinct young voices in fashion.