Quilted Latex

Over the years people have often asked me how i design my collections; where my ideas come from. Hopefully the following article will go some way to explain the thought processes behind putting a new collection together and how those ideas germinate.

Two years ago I decided to set myself a challenge of taking latex into new territory. Having worked with latex for over thirty five years i needed a new direction. I wondered if it was possible to quilt latex and began by using small areas of quilting on waistcoats for men. My initial vision saw quilting as male territory.  My Menswear had been neglected for a long time and needed a fresh look so that was where the experiments first occurred . Small areas of quilting incorporated into the overall design seemed to work and the public response was good so i developed it further into a new Bikers jacket with quilted sleeves and yoke. One customer then requested a completely quilted jacket which i initially thought would be impossible but i took it onboard and the resulting Jacket was great. Latex seemed to lend itself to being quilted. It is i suppose a tried and tested arena in high street fashion. Quilting is familiar in leather and now like denim it has become a staple garment in outerwear like nylon coats and jackets. So why not latex?

Whilst pursuing a fashion magazine I came across these amazing shapes of quilted silk designed by Pierpaolo Piccioli for Moncler who had made these huge padded ground length duvet coats and maxi  a-line dresses that made the models look like a cross between Renaissance madonnas and nuns. They seemed to ignite my sartorial flare for shape and so my journey began to transfer these ideas into womenswear  . Within fashion for the past two years there has been a distinct trend for exaggerated shapes and oversized garments. It became the starting point for a new collection for women that would be based on block shapes and block colour. The trend for colour blocking has been seen for a long time in fashion and i decided to use this idea of not breaking up the look with distracting contrast colour but just one colour per outfit. Working particularly with bright colours meant i had to steer clear of my failsafe colours of black and white and venture into new territory and it was on the suggestion of the photographer Aidan McCarthy that I had embarked on this distinct project .It was he who was going to photograph the collection , he suggested that I work with a bright colour palette and selected colours I really dislike like tangerine and acid green. It took me out of my comfort zone . My little black dresses were my staple, default position for every collection. It was  the position i had taken with the menswear and now to work with colours i had always avoided was a real challenge.  By the time i had made two outfits from these colours i loved them both equally. The look was completely fresh and new for latex but continued the Ectomorph trademark of stitched rubber.

At a  lecture on fashion that i recently attended at the ICA , one of the speakers Kaat Debo mentioned the Japanese notion of Ma which denotes the space or gap between the body and the garments that clothe it. Ma gives the wearer a natural freedom.   I became very interested in this concept and thought it could apply to latex,  especially in the way i was about to use it by creating shapes that touched the body in some areas but also allowed space between the body and the garment. It was a complete departure from the tight fitting , constricting qualities always associated with latex clothing. But it still embodied the fetish elements of enclosure and shape. In the eighties Japanese fashion designers altered the prevailing fashion aesthetic of symmetry , balance and perfection by concealing the body beneath many layers and draped styles. Fashion had hitherto worked according to the concept of shifting the erogenous zone from one area of the body to the other thereby focusing one season on the breasts with styles that used the décolleté exposing a woman’s cleavage. Another season the waist becomes the focus and is expressed through corseted or tightly waisted garments. It provided a framework for a collection. Most of the clothes presented by the Japanese designers were black and this became the fashion uniform. Plus the notion of layering clothes and cutting shapes from rectangles that were fitted together like a jigsaw was new and a different way of looking at fashion.They seemed to be deconstructing fashion. These ideas were particularly found in the collections of Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo for Comme de Garcons and Martin Margiela  whose  radical new approach  overturned the construction of garments and new shapes evolved for the body but ones that still had some historical reference to traditional garments like the Kimono. I took the kimono idea on as reference point for this new collection. The first female shape for this Concept Collection i produced was the tangerine two piece with a Geisha style Kimono, butterfly sleeve jacket and petal hemmed skirt.

Aidan had suggested i look at insects as inspiration for this new collection and it was the shapes of their wings, beetle, armour-like bodies, beehives that became the interconnecting threads and ideas for the new quilted collection.  As a designer you also find that  features from previous collections carry through to the current collection and there is an overlap that  links them up. I had used the concept of volume in the Victorian inspired collection that i produced several years ago which was expressed though big floor length voluminous skirts and tight boned bodices, parlour- maids outfits and pantaloons. Now this volume was expressed as large architectural shapes. This collection is just the beginning there will be more to come.

The Ectomorph client base is a complete amalgam of body shapes and gender persuasions so it seemed a good idea to use a gender fluid guy to model the collection to move away from gender stereotyping so prevalent in fetish images. I have nothing against those and in fact love the gender stereotyping as it is often so extreme. It was these archetypal images of the dominatrix that had attracted me to fetish images in the first place. Especially in the photographs of Helmut Newton.  My stance was a deliberate attempt to overthrow the dichotomy between male and female and embrace difference by drawing attention to gender neutrality and the ability of the wearer to be gender fluid. What was interesting about the model we selected called Blanket was his quality of obscuring the gendered body; being neither masculine nor feminine but a blend of both Blanket seemed to embody the spirit of gender androgyny Aidan and myself were after. A bit like David Bowie, a cultural icon that i had idolised and followed through his various incarnations as Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and others . My youth was dominated by seventies glam rock with pop stars like Marc Bolan, Bryan Ferry, Prince , Rod Stewart who all wore feminine clothes at some stage without relinquishing their masculinity. It was a unique period in fashion when men could wear female attire ,heavy make-up, flowing floral shirts and pants and yet still look like men. The contemporary aesthetic is to loose those divisive boundaries. But not everyone was convinced by Blanket  unsure whether he was male or female , as if that mattered. Not everyone understood our angle but fortunately loved the clothes even if they didn’t understand the models’ sexual orientation.

Some time later parts of the  collection were  re photographed By Keitel on a sexy dominatrix Zoe who gave the collection a different look  . She restored the femininity to the look .Her curvaceous figure  brought the architectural shapes to life and she loved the feel of wearing these clothes. The beauty of a garment like latex is that the shadow of the body remains in the garment long after we have worn them. They literally mould into our body shape. We inhabit those shapes.It reminded me of when I started making latex in 1985 when the trend for body hugging stretch clothes first came on the market with the discovery of lycra that was combined with other textiles to make them stretchable. The use of tight fitting sexy fashion was best illustrated by Azzedine Alaia who excelled in the use of lycra . I collected a lot of his styles and his oeuvre has often been in my mind when designing latex. The demand for body revealing shapes came out of the prevailing  obsession with body building and the need to get our bodies fit and healthy. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe photographed Lisa Lyons who was a famous female body builder in latex.  He produced influential photographs that i collected as ideas in my sketchbooks and i wrote about him in an article for ZG magazine in 1986. Contemporary beauty ideals  have transmogrified into the obsession with surgically altered or enhanced bodies and we see this in the fetish for inflated latex. In my collection this fetish for exaggeration took the form of overstated shapes. The over sized bronze Cape in the collection expresses this by  extending the shoulder beyond the natural curve of the arm so that it stood away from the body and a large standing collar framed the face. This allows the cape to be worn with either the zip fastening at the front or the back.  The skirt design for this outfit by being quilted could seemingly frame the body architecturally with shape.

The designer  Balenciaga had radically altered the way we looked at the body and clothing in the fifties with his amazing shapes like the sack dress ,puff ball gowns  and balloon dresses. These shapes altered the female silhouette from the familiar into the unfamiliar. By making these new shapes for the body Balenciaga managed to create great photographic images that were syndicated over the world .There was a retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum last year of this fashion with wonderful examples of these designs and the pictures that appeared in magazines and journals at the time worn often on famous models. This attitude to designing a collection and their execution influenced my way of working with latex for this current collection and has extended the boundaries in which latex ideas can be expressed. Often what is exciting about fetish clothes is not just what a garment reveals but what it conceals. It is sometimes only by radically pushing oneself into unknown territory that creativity blossoms.