The British artist Ed Fornieles created a fantasy world – someplace between modern day London and a not so distant future – to showcase the AW18 collection, which plays the gloss of HD against our corporeal reality.
Fornieles’s work often involves cultural, social and infrastructural production; orchestrating interventions that reconfigure the viewer’s position and sense of self. “You are what you wear. With each garment, look and style, we are asking ourselves: who am I?” he says.
The collection is brought to life through a cast of diverse archetypes all taken from the URL world. The prince and princess, the librarian, the anti-hero – a Replicant man, a villain and a troubled young prince, move through a magical landscape. Photographed by Fee-Gloria Groenemeyer and Iolo Lewis Edwards at Carlos/Ishikawa gallery and across the city of London, each character explores themes of friendship, destiny and legacy.
In reframing the collection, the artist applies a cosplay attitude, where the everyday meets a filmic or game-like reality. Berthold says; ‘Art plays a very definitive role for me. It isn’t something I grab at the start of the season for inspiration – and with the fashion calendar the way that it is right now, it felt like the right time to create work alongside an artist. To pose some real questions about what’s going on in the world. I wanted to pass the collection over to Ed and allow him to reinterpret and direct how our clothes could be seen. It has been so exciting to watch him build a new context for them.’