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Liam Johnson

Liam was chosen for the scholarship by lead designer at Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton. He spent his year in industry in Paris, working at Maison Margiela under John Galliano, working personally with the designer on both the artisanal and ready-to-wear collections. As a designer, his own collections often centre upon alternatives to normal fashion and instead offer remodelled silhouettes, bright colours, unexpected textures and sculptural, exaggerated forms.

Thom Browne

Mens SS 2020
“After the scene shifted from a selection of 2D garments, removed to reveal Browne’s brilliant designs below, the show began in earnest. The looks, as gleefully playful as ever, took on elements of Browne’s typical offerings and elevated them to the level of supreme costume design. Several imposing silhouettes recalled dresses worn by Antoinette-era aristocracy, with gargantuan trousers and shapely sportcoats crafted to resemble distorted Ivy League staples. Elsewhere, pleated skirts emerged as a prime trouser replacement, with cropped jackets and seersucker jockstraps to introduce a sporty motif.” Jake Silbert

Olafur Eliasson

Your uncertain shadow
Five coloured spotlights, directed at a white wall, are arranged in a line on the floor: a green light positioned next to another green light, followed by a magenta light, an orange light, and, finally, a blue light. These colours combine to illuminate the wall with a bright white light. When the visitor enters the space, her projected shadow, by blocking each coloured light from a slightly different angle, appears on the wall as an array of five differently coloured silhouettes.

Yegor Zaitsev

Fall-winter 2010 moscow – womenswear catwalks
The Russian fashion rebel Yegor Zaitsev presented an avant-garde collection which was surprisingly romantic.
Yegor took classic silhouettes extended them, volumized them, turned them upside down and made them into works of art.

KUNIHIKO MORINAGA

森永邦彦
쿠니히코 모리나가
くにひこ もりなが
КУНИХИКО МОРИНАГА
Anrealage

Kunihiko Morinaga, the creative director of cult Japanese label Anrealage, has a thing for sensations and optical illusions. His debut Paris show last season was about light and shadow. Today, his sophomore outing focused on light and dark. Or, better, on the impressions you get from flashing or projecting light in pitch black. The Anrealage sculptural silhouettes were cut in a special black fabric that revealed a printed texture only under ultraviolet lights, or had needle-punched white circles—like a spotlight projection—splattered across the front. To emphasize the depth of such darkness, everything was black, including models’ faces, a heavy stroke that made things a little too dramatic.

iris van herpen

sensory seas
runway LOOK 08

“The first threads of inspiration came from the Spanish neuroanatomist Ramón y Cajal. He wanted to uncover something that no one had yet understood.
Sensory seas’ holds a microscope over the indelible nuances between the anthropology of a marine organism, to the role of dendrites and synapses delivering infinite signals throughout our bodies. It enchants the attention of how two processes of torrential messaging exist in an uninterrupted state of flux. The collection consists 21 silhouettes that illustrate a portrait of liquid labyrinths, where dresses spill onto the floor in elegant train and pigments gather in cloudedpools of blues and lilac, leaking into one another like marble.” Joanna Klein

Liam Johnson

Liam a été choisie pour la bourse par la designer principale d’Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton. Il a passé son année dans l’industrie à Paris, travaillant à la Maison Margiela sous John Galliano, travaillant personnellement avec le créateur sur les collections artisanales et de prêt-à-porter. En tant que designer, ses propres collections se concentrent souvent sur des alternatives à la mode normale et proposent à la place des silhouettes remodelées, des couleurs vives, des textures inattendues et des formes sculpturales exagérées.

Rosie Danford Phillips

Opulent Virulence
“My collection is inspired by my fascination with nature; an interpretation of the complexity and unrestrained beauty of nature, which I express through complex layering, colour and a maximalist aesthetic that takes joy in abundance and opulence. I create my own ecosystems of layered and built fabrics in knit, print and unconventional embroidery. My clothes are in a state of rewilding – I infect the silhouettes with rich colourful textiles, giving them life. I grow my embroideries over graphic and sculptural silhouettes to emphasise and contrast the organic and the built landscape.” Rosie Danford Phillips

Richard Quinn

Fall 2018
Even though he was only given a few days’ notice of the royal’s attendance, Quinn lived up to the expectations. He maintained his focused vision, shining the spotlight on his impressive printwork and flair for standout, dramatic silhouettes. An array of abstracted floral prints — all created in-house at the designer’s print studio in Peckham — were mashed up on loose halterneck dresses, delicately pleated chiffon skirts and oversize bomber jackets, to create a visual feast of color and pattern.

Pia Männikkö

Verges
In Pia Männikkö’s installation Verges the gallery space is completely filled with white tulle fabrics that hang from a grid of metal wires. Viewers are invited to enter the installation. The fabrics are open on all sides so the viewer can freely choose which way to go. The white surroundings affect the viewer’s sense of the space and as a result the viewer cannot exactly locate the edges of the room. Adding to the sense of disorientation, other people moving in the space seem like silhouettes disappearing gradually into the whiteness.

Olga Noronha

She has a thing for anatomy, inherited from her parents. But instead of becoming a doctor, Olga Noronha (born in 1990) transformed this interest into a unique language that creates a dialogue between the human body and sculptural pieces of jewelry. Like in series “Orpus in Claustrum”. The collection presents a courageous juxtaposition of crimson priestesses in soft silhouettes and sensational structured items that envelope the model like a modern-day Aelita, queen of space, from the homonymous movie of 1924 directed by Constructivist Yakov Protazanov.

ALBA PRAT

digitalized
“Tron, a cult film from 1982, takes place in two parallel universes: the real and the virtual. Through a laser that converts real people into pixels, the world of Tron appears like a strange foreign world without sun, where androids live surrounded by 3D landscapes. The film has a strong retro character given by the era of production, which coexists with a high-tech nature. Both aspects are the basis of my collection. It consists in androgyn, straight silhouettes out of wool, leather, cotton and lack. Through different techniques I have created cube patterns on the surface of some of the materials. Giving the designs a technical yet minimalist character.”

FABIANO ONÇA & COLMEIA

Tantalus Quest
file festival

Game designer Fabiano Onça conceived the game, in which people must fill geometric shapes with their own silhouettes (as captured by webcams hanging from the ceiling): Software was built with OpenFrameworks, which is to C++ what Processing is to Java. A prototype was built with Flash (AS3), but it was slow — reading pixel values (BitmapData.getPixel) can be processor-heavy. Thanks to OpenFrameworks, porting the AS3 code to C++ was quite easy. The application is very simple: the images captured by the cameras are brightened, blurred and thresholded, resulting in black blobs. The amount of blob pixels inside the geometric shape count as positive points and the pixels outside the geometric shape count as negative points.

nonotak

SILHOUETTES
SILHOUETTES is a dialogue between space and light. Dots become lines, lines become curves. Directions and trajectories are drawn, space become oriented and is set in motion. Space is not vacuum, literally, but it becomes matter and it starts dancing in a field of shadow and light..

Camille Henrot

Endangered Species
Best-known for her videos and animated films combining drawn art, music and occasionally scratched or reworked cinematic images, Camille Henrot’s work blurs the traditionally hierarchical categories of art history. Her recent work, adapted into the diverse media of sculpture, drawing, photography and, as always, film, considers the fascination with the “other” and “elsewhere” in terms of both geography and sexuality. This fascination is reflected in popular modern myths that have inspired her, such as King Kong and Frankenstein. The artist’s impure, hybrid objects cast doubt upon the linear and partitioned transcription of Western history and highlight its borrowings and grey areas. In the series of sculptures Endangered Species, for example, the artist has created objects inspired by African art by using pieces from car engines; placed on tall pedestals, these slender silhouettes with zoomorphic allure make reference to the migration of symbols and forms as well as to the economic circulation of objects. This survival of the past, full of misunderstandings, shifts and projections (as shown in the slideshow Egyptomania, the film Cynopolis, drawings of the Sphinx, and even in the photographs of prehistoric flints) troubles cultural codes and conventions. In this way, Camille Henrot’s work questions mental resistances and the past’s resonance, whether it be drawn from myth or from reality.

JASPER JAMES

Джаспера Джеймса
ג’ספר ג’יימס
ジャスパー·ジェームズ
재스퍼 제임스
City Silhouettes

Joon Y. Moon

Augmented Shadow
File Festival

Augmented Shadow is a design experiment producing an artificial shadow effect through the use of tangible objects, blocks, on a displayable tabletop interface. Its goal is to offer a new type of user-experience. The project plays on the fact that shadows present distorted silhouettes depending on the light. Augmented Shadows take the distortion effect into the realm of fantasy. Shadows display below the objects according to the physics of the real world. However, the shadows themselves transform the objects into houses, occupied by shadow creatures. By moving the blocks around the table the user sets off series of reactions within this new fantasy ecosystem. In this installation, the shadows exist both in a real and a virtual environment simultaneously. It thus brings augmented reality to the tabletop by way of a tangible interface. The shadow is an interface metaphor connecting the virtual world and users. Second, the unexpected user experience results from manipulating the users’ visual perceptions, expectations, and imagination to inspire re-perception and new understanding. Therefore, users can play with the shadows lying on the boundary between the real, virtual, and fantasy. Augmented Shadow utilizes this unique interface metaphor for interactive storytelling. Maximizing the magical amusement of AR, it is embedding an ecosystem where imaginary objects and organic beings co-exist while each of them influences on each other’s life-cycle, even though it is not in use by users. Light and shadow play critical roles in this world’s functions causing chain reactions between virtual people, trees, birds, and houses. A set of tangible blocks allows users to participate in the ecosystem. Users can influence on the system by playing with the blocks or observe the changes of the shadows as if kids were playing with an ant farm.

HUSSEIN CHALAYAN

フセイン·チャラヤン
Чалаян
후세인 샬 라얀
Animatronic Fashion mashup
Furthering his technological trend, Chalayan unveiled the collection entitlledReadings, on screen, eshewing the conventional runway. The dresses themselves are highly structured, creating bold silhouettes from which the laser beams radiate. They are embellished with Swarovski crystals that either deflect the lasers, or take in their light, depending on the angle of the laser. The effect is hauntingly beautiful; where lasers shine directly into Swarovski crystals, they resemble glowing embers, yet where they are deflected the laser beams project into the surrounding space, evoking phantasmagorical new-age sun gods.