Demna's outfit for YKK
October 17, 2005
| After winning Collection of the Year at ITS#THREE, Demna Gvasalia, as every winner of this prize at ITS, came back at ITS#FOUR to present his new collection (produced using part of the award money) and to be part of the Fashion Jury. But this is not all: in collaboration with YKK, a sponsor of the event and leader company in fastening products, he was asked to design an extra outfit with a focus on fastenings. No limit was given to his creativity, and he was free to think and create the outfit just as he pleased. Whenever he asked for a certain kind of zipper, made in a certain way to fit his needs, he always found YKK ready to give him what he needed. And when I tell you that they were always ready to give him what he needed, I really mean it! At YKK they are even capable of producing a new zip just for the designer, done following his requests. These guys produce thousands of different kinds of fastenings, so many that nobody in the company knows every single different type (at least I think so...if there is they should think about doing a TV show on this person with such a brain...)! So Demna began thinking about the outfit, and obviously the first step (well, it's surely not be the same for all fashion designers, but I suppose most of them do so...) was putting his ideas on paper: |
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| From these first sketches it was quite clear that Demna's idea was to fill the jacket with zips, literally making the jacket without using fabrics but just zippers. The gigantic bowtie made it clear that Demna's inspiration came partly from the clothes of the clown, which made the mood of the outfit very "cabaret". He was still not sure if it was better to have tight trousers or baggy, comfortable ones. Meanwhile, he received a sample kit from YKK to start thinking about which zippers he would have liked to use for the outfit. Going through the various zippers, he realised that there were also some of them he would have liked to use for his own collection. So he began asking for fastenings to be used on the collection "No Title: Part I" which he was also preparing for ITS#FOUR. So, from a collaboration on one outfit it became also a collaboration for an entire collection! The passage from paper sketches to the photos of the first drafts of the outfit was quite fast. In these first images, we finally got the chance to see the first realisation of the "zipper jacket" (I've invented this definition right now...), made out of meters and meters of zippers (more than 56!!!) stitched together: |
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| Demna used one single type of zipper, a black, very shiny one ( a color similar to that of the old vinyl records). The make up of the model washed away all doubts concerning inspiration from the clown. These first photos showed also another detail on the head, where Demna had put an open zipper following the side part of the hair. Detail that disappeared in the following photo shoot (Demna was very excited about it, since it was his very first time!) made by YKK with the collaboration of the photographer Ed Landman. After a 7 hours and more than 300 shots, made using the "baggy trousers" version of the outfit and the "skinny trousers" one, with several light tests and different make ups, this was the resulting image that would have revealed Demna's outfit to the eyes of people all around the world: |
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Finally, as you can see in the photo, the decision fell on the version with the skinny trousers. But it's during the ITS#FOUR fashion show that the final version of the outfit was revealed. Losing the bowtie and adopting black instead of white for the shoes, Demna's creation had a great success on the catwalk, showing again, had there been any doubts, his amazing talent: |
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| This is the final result of YKK's project with Demna Gvasalia. But YKK's collaboration with ITS does not end here! ITS#FIVE will see the opening of the Accessories Field, with a special project involving a selected number of schools, who will choose a selected number of students....hey, but I'm telling you a bit too much about it! Anyway, guess who will be the partner for this new project? It starts with Y and ends with K.... |
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