Many fashion designers started their career moving from a very simple principle, “low on resources, high on resourcefulness”.
Nicolas Petrou should definitely be included among them.
Born on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, as a young child Petrou often played around with scraps of fabrics.
When he grew up, his aunt, who worked at the time as a seamstress, allowed him to use her sewing machine, a classic Singer with a manual pedal.
Petrou started working on his early fashion experiments that were characterised at the time by shapes and silhouettes determined by the amount of fabric he had at his disposal.
Soon he started altering his friends’ clothes, playing with proportions, adding sleeves on T-shirts, inserts on denim trousers or hand-painted details.
Growing up on an island with not so many resources available pushed Petrou to learn more about other cultures and customs, keeping an open mind towards other people’s habits and tastes in art, fashion and music.
After finishing his MA in Fashion Design from London’s Central Saint Martins, Petrou moved to New York where he worked for different companies and also started his eponymous womenswear label.
The designer recently launched a high-end menswear line, Petrou\Man.
Materials play a huge role in the designer’s menswear collections that are characterised by precise tailoring, a modern sense of proportions and a creative vitality expressed in the reconfigured elements of deconstructed clothing, in the distinctive take on masculine shapes and in a great attention for technologically advanced fabrics.
The interview that follows is an extract from a longer article I did for the next issue of Zoot Magazine (Spring/Summer 2010).
In which ways do nomads inform and inspire your Autumn/Winter 2010-11 collection?
Nicolas Petrou: In one way or the other we are all nomads. Yet I think that, while working on this collection, I was mainly fascinated by the fact that there are more than fifty million nomads on our planet today and I felt I wanted to explore their world and habits. Nomads travel with all their belongings, often wear their clothes by layering them out of necessity, combining, by chance or because of lack of resources, patterns that clash one with the other. I found their randomly created looks amazing and these looks also inspired me the combinations and the layering of different fabrics such as suede, wool and nylon. Classic shapes were reinvented by adding stretch fabrics that allowed better movement to the wearer, a theme inspired by the immense comfort nomads need while travelling.
There is a sort of apparent yet well-balanced disorder in your Autumn/Winter 2010 collection, how did you manage to reach it?
Nicolas Petrou: It’s an amazing process and a satisfying experience working and consulting with people I admire. Bringing all these people together and presenting a cohesive collection is not an easy task and this is why I hire people that I respect. Robbie Spencer, Menswear Fashion Editor at Dazed & Confused, styled the last two collections with his unique vision; Duffy who did the hair and Maki Ryoke who did the makeup are both so talented and creative people; Robert Sumrell did the lights and sets and worked around the nomad subject endlessly to strike the right balance between the old and the new. Last but not least, Michael Magnan did an amazing job mixing the music and creating sound effects that gave the impression to the people who came to the presentation that they were actually traveling like nomads.
You always present your collections through interesting installations: do you ever consider yourself as an artist rather than a designer?
Nicolas Petrou: Petrou\Man is all about wearable clothes. Yet, at the same time, I always feel the need to present them in more artistic ways. Considering the world we live in and the destruction that surrounds us all, I think it’s nice to be able to present a fashion collection by escaping to a more abstract and not so conventional place.
Do you feel that the world of menswear is changing and designers are bringing back a modern and distinctively sporty sophistication both on the runways and in everyday life?
Nicolas Petrou: At the moment, there is definitely a new and exciting menswear “movement” and that’s great, though I don’t know if it will ever compete with womenswear let alone surpass it. Yet things are changing fast in menswear and I think there is a sort of mini-revolution going on. It’s exciting to see all these new menswear brands coming up with so much creativity and well-thought clothing. Designers are realising they cannot compete with big retailers such as Gap, H&M or Topman and they are striving to offer something different and special that it is not possible to achieve for all these mass market brands, like handmade details and appliquéd motifs or technically advanced fabric treatments.
What do you think is missing in menswear: a good balance between sportswear and tailoring, quality or attention to details?
Nicolas Petrou: (Chuckling) All of the above! Things are so mass-produced now that people actually forget the purpose of designer clothing. That’s what I’m interested in offering to people: Petrou\Man designs are characterised by an immense love for what I do and are all worked upon by hand. With my creations I try to offer something unique and exciting yet wearable, always bearing in mind technology, fit and performance. If you strip away the styling, hair and makeup and look at all the pieces individually, you realise that all of them are beautifully made yet they are also practically functional.
When you set up working on a new Petrou\Man collection, where do you usually start from?
Nicolas Petrou: My head designer Soteris Kallis and I always discuss our personal needs when it comes to menswear and what we feel is missing from the market. When it comes to inspiration we always research subjects that interest us, moving from an artist, an object, a movie or a tribe. We do a lot of research on technological advances in fabrics, durability and ease of movement. With every collection we try to blend classic shapes with active sportswear, creating dichotomic contradictions.
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