If you’re free today, you’re fashion-starved and you happen to be in London, don’t miss the designers in conversation event chaired by Penny Martin, Editor in Chief of SHOWstudio, featuring design duo Boudicca. The talk is part of the events organised during the amazing exhibition “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture”, which is on until 24th August at the Embankment Galleries, Somerset House.
Three outfits from design duo Boudicca are part of the exhibition, the Black Lowry, the Half Rendered and the In Flux ensembles, all from the duo’s “Invisible City” collection. Boudicca’s Zowie Broach and Brian Kirby were inspired for this collection by Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Le città invisibili.
The novel is an imagined conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The traveller describes in the book cities that he has never visited, creating different places through the power of imagination. The metaphorical and allegorical narration often assumes philosophical tones, as Marco Polo takes the reader through a mind journey, transforming the streets, the buildings and the people he describes into a dream. The descriptions featured in Calvino’s book have the power of stimulating fantasy and imagination. Listening Marco Polo describing the various cities, the readers form in their mind visions of those imaginary places, they make them real and dream, create and travel with him.
The idea behind Boudicca’s collection is to produce outfits from the power of imagination, “building” an invisible city for the clothes before they were made. The outfits – created using a mix of traditional and futuristic materials, such as wool, jersey, leather, mirrors, silk striped with polyester lurex and hyper-nylon – reference an imaginary world but also the Edwardian past, with brooches worn at the neck and tuxedo-like jackets with a slightly military appeal.
The skirts are rather elaborate, some have a bustle at the back while the material is folded, pleated and stiffened to resemble armours, sculptures and buildings. Indeed, some of the outfits from this collection echo the warped and rigid forms of Frank Gehry’s deconstructivist buildings. Boudicca’s Invisible City outfits are power suits for women as strong as cold cyborgs and as fragile as delicate ballerinas.
Penny Martin and Boudicca, Designers in conversation, “SKIN + BONES: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture”, Thursday 17th April 18, 6.00pm – 8.00pm, Lecture Theatre, Somerset House, £10 combined exhibition and talk ticket; £5 talk ticket only.
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