Fashion is such a fast paced and contemporary discipline
that sometimes it's good for fashion designers to step out of that and look at
what is a little bit more permanent,
what is a little bit more, let's say, fixed in time.
Velázquez or Titian or Poussin
My interest in doing fashion is just
exploring fine art on body, basically.
Oh, wow.
You could do like a whole collection
just by looking at one painting in this room.
True. That's so true.
Turner, a lot of his, like landscape paintings
kind of reminds me of when I used to live in North Dakota.
The Badlands...just earth tones within his paintings.
Basically, I come from a very small town,
so to be here and to be able
to have all of this access to a lot of visual culture,
it's really important to my work.
It's a painting of two little girls chasing butterflies.
I was with my sister, that reminded her of us.
The emotional connection
between something that was documented
so long ago.
And this still forms an emotional connection.
There's a perception that galleries and museums
are really stuffy and they're quite scary
and intimidating places.
As a child growing up in London,
they didn't really seem a part of my world.
I made the decision I was going to go.
I was going to take that step,
literally take the steps up to the National Gallery
and go and see what all the fuss was about.
You know? And it was and I can remember it so well.
It was such an eye opener. I can remember going
and seeing 'Van Gogh's Chair',
being able to see the marks
that had been made with the paint.
Suddenly, this 2D image that I was really familiar with
suddenly became this 3D textural piece.
For me, fine art has such a big part
in my work.
It really translates from,
I would say, the two dimensional format
to the three dimensional format
that fashion is, essentially.
In terms of pattern cutting, you know, how do you create those forms?
How do you... how do you make fabric do these really elaborate things?
As fashion people, we're looking at form, proportion, colour,
detail, fabrics, surface, scale!
For me, what art does is it just it feeds the brain.
Dramatic storytelling is what we do as fashion designers.
We also almost build characters
and personas because it's very similar to costume,
but it's more contemporary.
There's a sense of drama and probably,
you could draw parallels with fashion campaigns and fashion photoshoots.
It's all about the apparatus, the decorum of it all.
All dresses are very voluminous, it just takes the whole entire painting.
The depiction of transparent fabric,
so it would be organza or really sheer silk,
on top of that, you've got a very delicate kind of lace.
The paint itself can almost mimic that embroidery texture.
The colours at the time for painting were
originated actually from the natural world.
I specialise in circular processes.
So I use fungi, bacterias and other micro-organisms in my work
to make it more sustainable.
It's the next challenge for our generation.
For me, wildlife and landscapes are very essential to my work.
I get as inspired by cultural artifacts
as I am inspired by nature.
Paintings are the first documentation
of like clothing for me from a fashion standpoint.
Being in London we're really, really lucky in as much as
various museums and galleries, which are free,
you know, which is a really huge privilege.
It's like the illusion comes off somehow,
and you can actually see into
like the technique of the artist.
Without knowing the background of the artist
and the madness behind everything,
it looked like it was a really enjoyable experience
to actually create these pieces of work.
It's like this little box full of lots of wonders of the world.
And, you know, it's amazing just physically to be there, really.
I'm a great one for, 'Get up off your backside,
get on a bus
and go and see something for real'.
Experience it.