The results of the Scottish Fashion Awards were unveiled yesterday during a ceremony at Stirling Castle. One of the nominee in the "Young Designer of the Year" category was Jamie Bruski Tetsill.
Tipped as the next big thing to come out of Scotland, Tetsill’s passion for combining craftsmanship and tradition with modern shapes and silhouettes and his determination to merge fashion and interior design, might definitely set him apart from his fellow designers.
Tetsill has indeed turned tufting - a weaving technique mainly employed in carpet-making - into his trademark design. “I had worked a lot with chiffon and also did some interesting prints on it, but I found it quite flat and started thinking about how to use it in a more three-dimensional way that gave this material an exciting and tactile quality,“ he explains.
Tetsill started making large pom-poms out of the chiffon, cutting them and allowing the prints to fall in an unusual way. Inspired by what he found out, he started looking into tufting and carpet-making processes, researching all the different companies that do tufting and even getting his hands on an old candlewick machine from the 1900s on which he experimented further.
Later on, he applied the technique he had learnt to master to his Autumn-Winter 2007/08 collection that featured turquoise and emerald green linen dresses, embellished with tufted zig-zagging motifs. 
Tetsill kept on researching the tufting technique in the months that followed, developing it and bringing it to a new level in his Spring-Summer 2008 collection. “I got a lot of silk chiffon, dyed it in different colours, concertinaed it and sewed it in geometric shapes across the garments in a gradient of colour,” he says. “I basically sewed the chiffon onto the actual silk and then cut it away, to release the tufting effect and the various colour nuances.” With a bold colour palette of three different base tones of purple - from mauves to intense indigo blues - the hand-tufted chiffon shapes move through a gradient of colour until meeting with the same tones as the base cloth, creating fluidity and movement throughout the whole collection.
The final effect is striking: it’s as if the colours of the tufted appliqués “moved” in unison with the movements of the person wearing the garment, but that wasn’t Tetsill's only aim. “I also wanted to create a contrast of varying textures and weights between my base cloth - Fuji silk - a very fragile material, and the dyed layers of chiffon appliqué and achieve a sort of tailored sophisticated effect while keeping the design light-hearted.” 
Textiles and fabrics play a very strong part in Tetsill's designs: he graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a BA in Textiles, and, when he moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins, he chose an MA in fashion with textiles as pathway. “When I design a collection, I rely very heavily on fabrics,” he states. “I usually need just as long to develop the fabric and the technique as I do to construct and design the silhouette. Designing the textile to me is just as big a part as designing the collection, the shapes and proportions. The fabric remains my focus and usually I design it first while the silhouette comes second.” 
Tetsill's game of contrasts between unusual weights and thickness of fabrics and materials characterises also his Autumn-Winter 2008/09 collection, inspired by strong independent women. Materials are used in this collection to play with sculptural structures: woollen zip-up tubular-shaped sweater dresses are hemmed with thick leather trims, so that the harshness of the leather contrasts with the softness of the wool; oversized tartan and check printed coats are shaped like cocoons that gently hug the body, while short jackets are characterised by dolman sleeves cut with the body of the garment to give it an half-jacket/half-cape illusion.
This collection - that has an ‘80s feel thanks to its glamorously sophisticated casual playfulness and its vibrant and daring colours - marks also the beginning of an interesting collaboration between the young designer and Alexanders of Scotland. The collaboration with Tetsill's and the Peterhead-based brand will continue in the future, in the meantime, the young designer is also working on a project with an Edinburgh-based renowned institution, the Dovecot Studios, an innovative tapestry company. Tetsill's interest in tufting has indeed inspired him to start designing large-scale hand-tufted rugs using the facilities at Dovecot. “I see working in fashion and developing new techniques for rug designs as two projects that are very close together,” the young designer claims. “I’ve always been quite interested in interiors and I quite like the fact that I’m taking the element of tufting out of interior design to move it in fashion and then to move it back to interior design. I find it a very inspiring story.”
To read the complete interview with Jamie Bruski Tetsill, check out the Summer 2008 issue of Zoot Magazine, which also features an exclusive photo shoot with Tetsill taken in June 2008 in London.
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