words samine joudat
images aitor throup studio
The Goofy hat, Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman mask, and C.P. Company’s original Goggle Jacket by Massimo Osti, designed for the famed Italian Mille Miglia race and once ubiquitous on the terraces of Burnley Football Club: this is why Aitor Throup studied fashion. Or at least, these are the objects that launched his imagination into orbit, in search of the ability to convey narrative through garments.
They allowed him to see the potential fashion and design have in both capturing emotion and reimagining tradition. Understanding the unique design process behind each item led him to see that it is indeed possible to reference the past and still shape an entirely new context. Each object adhered to its own set of historical constraints and yet found a way to be transformative.
If that isn’t the ordinary springboard for becoming a fashion designer, it’s because Throup isn’t an ordinary fashion designer. He’s a multidisciplinary artist obsessed with the powers of anatomy, emotion, and product design. He is a consumer of comic books that is equally interested in Pablo Picasso and Kendrick Lamar. His work is rigorously process-oriented, adhering very closely to a secret design manifesto his studio released a number of years ago.
For long stretches of time, he tells me, the fashion industry has not understood the full depth of his message. Although acclaimed and highly respected across industries (he recently accepted a Designs of the Year nomination from London’s Design Museum for his conceptual runway debut ‘The Rite of Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter’), it becomes clear when he discusses his work that the creative purity and ambition of his ideas are at times too big for the shrinking attention spans of the fashion establishment. Indeed, the low-key émigré from Argentina, who sees the runway as an opportunity for conceptual art rather than product promotion, is an outlier in the endlessly self-promoting industry.
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Instead, Throup is incessantly in search of what it means to be timeless. To create functional objects that are as emotionally resonant as the ones that inspired him. It’s a search he keeps in the back of his mind both as a performance designer and a conceptual artist, revisiting it periodically to see how it might have evolved. He believes objects attain a timeless cultural value when they are the result of a specific process dedicated to solving a specific problem. He views his own work through this lens. Design solutions and aesthetic choices are made in service of the original problem or concept he sets out to pry. In this paradigm, products become what he refers to as ‘physical fragments of history’.
reason —> process —> result
You can see how Throup’s complex, sometimes conflicting, visions for his work might complicate his relationship with the ruthlessly compromising fashion industry. Although it has given him the platform to create, Throup also cites the consumption system model of the industry as a hindrance to creating truly timeless work. He says the typical fashion designer today starts the creative process with a vision of the result, and their process is then dictated by materializing that vision in garment form. This starkly opposes the process of actually solving or highlighting a problem, often leading to products void of anything besides expression for consumption’s sake.
When our talk shifts to the larger economic forces that dominate so much of our realities, Aitor suggests that it has turned us into a ‘what’ society and pushed us away from a ‘why’ society. From a young age, large parts of western society are pushed to learn and master a few specific disciplines that can materially sustain them, without ever questioning their own motivations within it. ‘A preordained what’, he continues. ‘You learn about the history of the what. You learn about the value of the what. How to make what into money. How to convert it, how to sell it. Our consumerist and capitalist society values the what, not the why. This is the current socio-economic construct.’ He goes on to suggest that, ironically, some of the most important brands that achieve cultural ubiquity focus on the why. They don’t sell a product as much as they do a value proposition. They are the why brands.
In light of this reality, Throup mentions the need for a mechanism that helps address this ‘what versus why’ dichotomy in a non-economic way. Perhaps instilling it in education systems, so that alongside the mastery of whats, we can also explore our own whys. His own practice based in Amsterdam, titled New Object Research, is deeply committed to this principle of inquiry. Throup suggests that for his team the strict adherence to the why ultimately forces them to come up with a what, as well.
As an example, he refers to a graduate school brief from his time at London’s Royal College of Art. He was given the unenviable task of reinventing the white t-shirt without embellishing or printing on it. He says it instilled in him early on to learn to accept constraints while still proposing a solution. He created three drawings and decided to sculpt miniature versions of each to see where it would lead him. He then carefully crafted a skin onto each miniature sculpture to cover them, and when he finally took off the material he was left with these unusual patterns where every cutline and dart was dictated by the sculpting process mimicking the sketches. He actually realized he had created the negative space of the miniature objects by bringing the drawings into three dimensional form. This process of creating a chain of problems and proposing solutions along the way is very much in step with principles of product design. So he took the skin off, scanned the three objects into a computer, rebalanced the patterns and printed their replicas in human scale - roughly 550% bigger. It ultimately resulted, he says, in three distinctly unique t-shirts in white jersey, which were effectively reproductions of his sketches. In other words, each was merely a symptom of the creative process he undertook to address the original brief.
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Speaking of his drawings. Of all the elements that draw me to Throup’s work, his sketches are what fascinate me the most. He’s been drawing ever since he can remember, and beginning in 2012, started to document them digitally in The Daily Sketchbook Archives. He refers to them as the core and essence of his work.
They are a loose collection of forlorn mythic humanoids, anthropomorphic creatures borne of Throup’s complicated imagination and suspended in the endless possibilities of white space. Like the rest of his work, they exude a deep sense of empathy and almost compel the viewer to imagine, momentarily, what it’s like to be in that ethereal world. In many ways, Throup’s artistic vision is reminiscent of the romantic, magical realism found in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. But maybe that’s just because they both hail from Argentina.
Beyond serving as a meditative practice, the drawings also reinforce Throup’s obsession with anatomy. According to his studio, he uses anatomy as ‘a sort of corporeal conceptual-vehicle linking the conflict between our inner-self (spirit) and our outer-self (ego)’. He’s also inspired by the body physically working to reconcile so many different interdependent systems into one complex whole.
In what is a culmination of both his most recent conceptual vision and his expertise in performance design, Throup has created the costumes for the upcoming dance work by renowned contemporary choreographer Wayne McGregor. Throup has created a translucent modular layering system out of breathable mesh, which allows each dancer to wear the same costume in completely different configurations - and simultaneously exposes as much of the movement of the human form as possible.
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Aitor Throup has accomplished a lot. He’s created a highly coveted, one-off wool Batman jacket. He’s collaborated with Stone Island and Umbro. He’s created an England national football team kit. He’s animated a music video. He has served as creative director of the rock band Kasabian. And he continues to push denim innovation as executive creative director of Amsterdam label G-Star RAW.
So, what’s next? Moving forward, he’s interested in further pursuing sculpting and puppeteering. He’s finally about ready to debut his much-anticipated ready-to-wear line. He’s also really excited by the idea of bringing his drawings and narratives to life through fully-articulated toy figurines. Regardless of medium, his work will remain deeply introspective as he continues to navigate his own whys. Most importantly, he says he considers the mad world his daughter is going to grow up in and feels an urgency to instill values in her that are more ‘substance than surface’. Values that include having radical ambitions and remaining completely authentic at the same time. Perhaps Aitor Throup’s own radical ambitions foil our need to place him into one or two categories, but for those of us watching him intently, we are all the better for it.
