Printed textiles for Giles fashion collection

For this work for Giles (the label) I developed a three-way collaboration between the fashion designer Giles Deacon, the textile digital print designer Rory Creighton and myself as the textile handprint designer. My own specialism is in dimensional techniques of printing onto specialist base fabrics on which digital print does not work. I hand-print onto base fabrics that are woven to order in Italy but are often too specialist to be printed on by commercial print mills.

For this collection I produced textural glitter, flocking and large-scale engineered printing, developing the textural and three-dimensional approach I first pioneered for Alexander McQueen in the mid-to-late 1990s, but I changed the aesthetic to make it look slick rather than ravaged. In this respect I combined materials and process innovation with design innovation to push at the boundaries of my discipline, by advancing research done for one designer in subsequent research done for another.

For this collection I also developed a large, over-scaled leopard-skin print that was used as a dress and a skirt. Playing with the fashion cliché of animal I used scale to change its visual impact and iconography, distorting it through magnification to make an organic pattern look artificial and unreal. The pattern was further distorted in a four-way split by being mirrored both vertically and horizontally around the stomach through the cutting and printing of the pattern pieces.

These textiles were used in the Giles catwalk show and featured in ID Oct 06: Evening Standard 27.11.06 as well as other international publications. The collection can also be viewed online at vogue.co.uk, style.com and catwalking.com. There was a feature on my work in British Vogue in February 2007.

Giles Deacon was named British Designer of the Year in 2006.