A while back I did an interview for Zoot Magazine with Aleksandar Stanic, one half with Fiona Sinha of design duo Sinha-Stanic, twice recipient of the British Fashion Council Fashion Forward sponsorship. When I asked him what had changed in their work since they started in 2004 Aleksandar replied: “At the beginning we didn’t know what to expect, we were just working on a product we believed was right. Now, with our experience as a background, we have to think about our clients, because at the end of the day we still have to take care of the commercial side of a collection. So, while we want to be as creatively free as possible, at the back of our mind we still have to satisfy our clients.”
Aleksandar’s answer came to my mind after seeing Sinha-Stanic’s Spring/Summer 09 collection. The dichotomy between going forward and pushing the boundaries a bit with their designs was clear in the dresses, tops and trousers with prints of bubbling exploding lava and slightly apocalyptic cosmic skies that perfectly matched the overpowered energy of the images scrolling on the screen behind the models. Yet, at the same time, there were more commercial outfits such as jackets (sometimes sleeveless ones) and skinny trousers that – though rather rock’n’roll-ish – were more commercial.
Throughout the years Sinha-Stanic learnt to perfectly master the game of contrasts between fashionably commercial and fashion-forward: in their collections, neat tailoring is usually paired with a wide variety of techniques, simple shapes clash with the latest technology and luxurious fabrics complement humbler ones. “Sometimes we use a more expensive or posher fabric to make things feel more luxurious,” Aleksandar explained me during our chat, “at others we look at men’s jackets and coats and try to make them look more feminine by adapting them to the codes of womenswear.”
These two rules seemed to prevail in the duo’s new collection that uses different fabrics in an interesting way, but also plays with men’s coats and turns them into mini-dresses. The rigid and often boring shapes of men’s jackets assumed a sexier line, trousers became skinnier and silhouettes sculpturally marked. For their S/S collection Sinha-Stanic designed with a young audience in mind, clashing colours such as pink and orange and different textures and mixing inspirations as diverse as East End teddy girls, Peter Doig’s paintings and rockabilly radio to produce an energetic collection.
Like all the metropolises, London is a city of contrasts with its trendy districts, areas where sub-cultures generate a pulsating nightlife and the modern-day grime of the most deprived housing estates. Yet it’s exactly these contrasts that, reverberating upon the English capital, become crucial to the creativity of the local designers. Sinha-Stanic have a gift for criss-crossing the contrasts in their lives and turning them into elegant creations, fully-fledged tailored pieces infused with the irresistible fashionable attitude of youth.
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