Research; Designers

Designers:

Unmade: knitted merino wool garments sporting patterns that you can adapt for yourself, so your garment is completely individual to you. Ranges of patterns that you can move the lines around / add splats or drips etc. Not H&M cheap but for quality wool printed with a unique pattern, great for the price. Jumpers around £200, scarves £60. Each garment is knitted on a loom to the exact design the customer chooses.

Marc Jacobs, SS12 ready to wear: laser cutting

Viktor & Rolf:

Spring 2016 Haute Couture inspired by Picasso, laser cut features attached to dresses making the models look like walk sculptures

Hussein Chalayan: Famous for making ‘showpieces’, not really wearable garments but more for the moment, watching a coffee table turn into a skirt for example. His SS07 collection was strange, with a sci-fi feel to some of the outfits when others looked like something you might see on the high street. He uses microchips and animatronics to make his dresses move. It’s really quite beautiful to see the fabric moving and completely changing the garments structure. Chalayan seems to like the contrast of soft fabrics against rigid ones as lots of his collections feature plastic looking dresses along with silks, an odd mix but it really shows the difference in the way the garments move.

Tailor Made London: They have a unique 3D body scanner to take measurements rather than taking them by hand. Much faster, more accurate, less intrusive to the customer. First and only English men’s tailors to use this state of the art tech. Customer only needs to attend a single consultation, cutting down time and allowing for completion times of just 4-6 weeks, considerably less than other tailors. Suits start at £660 and average at around £895, compared to Savile Row suits which start at £3,000 and average around £5,000, taking around 6 months to complete as opposed to 6 weeks.

Richard Nicoll: In partnership with Disney and Studio XO, he showcased a Tinkerbell inspired dress at his SS15 show during London Fashion Week. “It was imperative for Richard that what went down the catwalk was ‘fashion’ not ‘tech’. The gasps were audible as the dress appeared, it was a huge moment for fashion technology. We’d built something that was truly desireable.” Matthew Drinkwater, head of Fashion innovation Agency, who brought the collab together. The dress is made of fibre optic fabric activated by high intensity LEDs. This design sparked the idea that the wearable tech we’re creating doesn’t necessarily need to do anything, it could simply enhance the garment visually.

Mary Katrantzou: Uses digital printing on garments showing “an object from art or design that a woman would not be able to wear if it were real”. Her collections have been based on anything from perfume bottles to vintage postage stamps. She always keep the image is central to her aesthetic. “Each print is designed around the garment, and the garment simultaneously around the print.” “Digital print allows me to experiment with print in a way that fine art and other methods could not. It opens up a huge spectrum for possibility; I can create possibility out of impossibility, surrealism out of realism and both vice versa.”

Jonathon Saunders:

Peter Pilotto:

Alexander Wang:

Pharrell (Project Runway dress):

Alexander McQueen:

Gareth Pugh:

Bodi.me:

Laura Dempsey cargocollective:

Hermione de Paula: engineered printing (panelled printing), digital printing