Painterly Does It

From drawn out antics by girl empowered women to the possible slow wane of digital print, all things are pointing to the “hand” again.  Or in luxury terms “les petites mains” tied up with the ideas of “savoir faire” – all of which are essential when justifying high end brands’ super high prices.  It must also have something to do with the trips back home and seeing my mother squirrelling away my sister’s final pieces from their art A-levels and GCSE’s.  Either way, I’ve been attracted to all things hand painted of late.

From a cynical point of view, hand-painted can also be attached to oft-used jargon like “one-off”, “unique” and “limited edition” that basically gives retailers and designers to add a few zeros to prices.  It’s also a prime opportunity for fashion to collude itself with the art world, elevating product with a point of difference.  From my rose-tinted vision though, to have something hand painted is to know that an item hasn’t just gone through the motions in a factory with set processes to get to you and that the designer has had a real “hand” on the physical item that you’re wearing.

At Dover Street Market in the cheeky sale preview, I bought these Comme des Garcons’ hand painted shoe covers (I did try to root out a specific artist/designer name responsible but “in-house” is about as close as I got).  They’re in part inspired by their support of Raw Vision, a journal celebrating outsider art and also by the way Rei Kawakubo played with child-like chaos in Comme’s S/S 14 collection.  With Comme des Garcons, it’s sometimes best not to ask why but to just react directly.  In the case of these shoe covers, all you need to do is look down, and your face bursts into a Sunny-D smile accompanied by a squeal of delight.  Having seen these shoe covers in all three Dover Street Market locations as well as on other people’s feet, I can attest that no two pairs are the same.  Some are heavier on the flowers and crowns, and some are more dense with the layers of brush strokes.  Selfridges and Ivo Milan are still selling them should you wish to smile with your feet.  They’re sold separately as standalone shoe covers and I’m finding they can go over some lace-up heels as well if you bend them a little.  Hours of fun await.

Worn with Junya Watanabe shirt and Craig Green shorts

At Bicester Village, when I was selecting my edit of British Designer Collective, Claire Barrow‘s leather jackets were one of my top picks.  Wild imagination takes over when Barrow is painting her characters and dream like narratives on to garment.  No garment seems calculated or planned out.  Her painted leather pieces are part of Barrow’s young trademark.  I loved the collaboration she did with Matches but missed out on a jacket there so this white leather specimen has come to me in happily belated fashion.  It’s the jacket that keeps on giving, the closer you look at the figures and faces painted with a warped yet utterly believable sense of reality.  Whilst Barrow doesn’t cite specific references in her method of painting, but certainly artists like Henry Darger and Howard Finster spring to mind, or a more notable reference – the outsider art concocted for the film Junebug.  Bicester Village’s British Designer Collective still has a lovely painted black biker from her S/S 14 collection (*unless someone has prudently bought it knowing how special it is) and G&B, Negozio also has a selection too.

Worn with Comme des Garcons skirt and top

Finally, at Fashion Sunday yesterday, it was wonderful to see Luke Brooks – a graduate who I have followed from BA to MA level – put paint to t-shirt with his father and come up with oversized “tree-tees” that are deliberately meant to change over time.  They’re intended to be washed, tumble-dried  and worn until the paintwork cracks even further.  Brooks and his dad dabbed at these XXXL tees to depict cherry blossom scenes with fantastical colour schemes on dip/tie-dyed backgrounds.  They’re the new gen Hypercolor t-shirts without the annoying disappointment when the Hypercolor technology fails you.  Here it’s just good old fashioned paint chipping off over time.

Worn with Jonathan Saunders skirt

Worn with Sister by Sibling skirt