When Gravity Fails
When Gravity Fails
A Diagonal Line For Men
Photography - Marinó Thorlacius
Model - Emil Þór Guðmundsson
Stylist - Arash Arfazadeh
STORY
This is the first complete menswear line from Sruli Recht.
“This collection happened in my hands instead of on paper… I just listened to the fabric and the forms and they told me what to do. To do this I came up with a technique to develop the collection; in the studio we made a half-scale mannequin [see i-D online video] and 3D sketched with fabrics straight onto the form. Making garments in half scale really reduced the amount of detail that you would otherwise put in because you have only so much space to work with. While doing this, we set up a technique I call a Macroscope, which is a camera trained on the form, connected to a projector, that throws the image of the half-scale mannequin and garment in progress up on the wall full-scale. The shaped fabric was then transferred to paper, scanned with a large format scanner, digitized to vector, scaled up, and then cut directly in fabric by the laser cutter. We re-draped in full size, corrected, rescanned, re-edited, re-cut, etc. This process dramatically reduced the amount of work time, while increasing the accuracy and detail of the whole process. Every aspect of the collection is laser cut, from the patterns to the materials and final garments.
What you have as an end result is very little wastage of raw materials, much less time spent tracing and cutting, and much more time to work and think with your hands on the actual garment. The whole thing is completely intuitive and free, but very dimensional and formed. The collection is entirely draped mostly from single pieces, and there was absolutely no design sketching. The result is a collection with a balance between construction and freedom.” - Sruli Recht, December 2010
The collection in three words - draped, raw, digital
MATERIALS
“The studio worked very closely with Atlantic Leather, a tannery in the north of Iceland run by the native Icelanders, working with the raw skins to make new materials… basically designing new leathers. I spent a lot of time up there playing with’ better these skins, and designing their treatments and finishes. So that is where all the leathers in this collection come from — horse, hunted wild reindeer, birds, fish and lamb.
Similarly we are using Icelandic wool and working with a local knit producer here to make our own knit constructions. All this means that about 98% of the collection is made from Icelandic materials, and material that we have in some way developed in our studio. The other 2% is the jersey we have to import because it isn’t made here.
We have spent the last year taming these wild and fantastic natural Icelandic materials for an international market.”
GARMENTS
The collection consists of a total look - from coats, jackets and cardigans, to trousers, shorts and leggings, complimented by shoes, boots, bags, gloves and silver jewellery - 55 styles, approximately 130 with material variations.
Our shoe/ boot samples are produced by Gu›rún Edda Einarsdóttir.
Show Piece One - “Icarus, post-crash”: 21 Svartfugl [blackbirds] on a hunted wild reindeer base.
After meeting a group of hunters, hunting birds and beasts, we struck up a deal: all the birds they could bring me, in exchange for a pound of breath. And birds they brought, bags and bags of them.
Hands soaked in feathers and flesh, they were sorted through, sent on ice to my tanner (a craftsman so brilliant I heard he once tanned air). What returned to our studio was not a pile of feathers and feet but rather the full-bodied, beaked husks of those once soft flying blackbirds. And out of their box they were pulled, put onto the stand, and the garment quite literally designed itself. All we had to do was sew it together… by hand and heart, on a reindeer base, body to body to back to wing, to have our,Icarus, post crash, sombre and in between.
Show Piece Two - “Born out of this”: 27 still born lambs, 3 regular lambs, military deadstock lining.
And it was said, during a conversation in the cold, cavernous walls of the tannery, chromium sulphate hanging low in the air, and not a piece of natural light leaking in, “what is that heap over there?”
Looking vaguely at the iridescent white pile to his left, said he “That…? They were not meant to be.”
And so it was agreed, I would take those lost souls, and from him to me they came.
Shaken, preferred, and pieced together, these almost once vessels, together now one, and draped as a single square, and a sleeve, and a pleated set/raglan hybrid, with darted shaping. A coat to end all, and begin again.