The Studio Visit: A-Cold-Wall*

On why he’s a fashion designer…
I feel like I’ve been operating within the realms of fashion design for about 11 years. I started with retail and commerce, selling fake Nike and adidas to local friends in the neighbourhood from the age of about 15 and that progressed into an actual interest in fashion and design as a whole. I started off in graphic design with a strong interest in product design which lead me to start screen printing t-shirts. Although I became a professional product designer,  I still had an infatuation with fashion and garments. This really came to fruition when I started working with Hood by Air and Shayne Oliver. I’d say I’m a fashion designer because it is what I spend my time doing. 
 
On creativity…
Fashion is an industry where there is a macro lens on creativity and it can be used almost as a Morse code to communicate and talk about several issues. Creativity is the bedrock and foundation for its existence and survival. What inspires me to work in fashion, is knowing that there is a working class and under class community that doesn’t necessarily have the correct signal point or translator for a lot of the narratives and stories that are able to be told, and it’s my job to tell those stories in a very articulate and avant-garde way. The community I come from and working class Britain inspire me a lot.
 
On what excites him about the fashion industry today…
Global fashion seems to have forged a sense of global unity across generations. There seems to be a coherent thread that interweaves between age groups and classes and it’s ahead of cultural differences and can be incredibly holistic. It’s like a common ground that brings people together.
 

On how his background influenced who he is today…
My father is a painter and a stained-glass window specialist for cathedrals and churches around the world. He actually studied with Damien Hirst just before Damien dropped out of CSM. He’s quite embedded in the art community in London and my mother is a painter as well. Growing up I think I always wanted to be an artist. I used to sell paintings and drawings I did from the age of eight. One of my childhood friends actually sent me a photo the other day of one of the first drawings I sold to him in our after-school club. Coming from a very artistic family meant that from a young age it was clear to me I would follow in their footsteps.
 
On his designs…
They are a semantic study. Sculptural, not just in the way the patterns are cut but, in terms of the material studying process that goes into producing A-Cold-Wall* garment. A-Cold-Wall* started as an art project, and it still is one, which is why it operates in several mediums. Of course, fashion is the basis. And the name itself came from the idea of melting pot London and the idea of class systems being quite interdimensional in melting pot cities, specifically London, Birmingham, and Manchester. I wanted to talk about the relationship of growing up in these areas where on one road you have the working class street and on the other you have the upper middle class street. We can look at Dalston and Islington and what I wanted to do was talk about this cross-pollination of ideas and viewpoints and our societal similarities and differences which are all juxtaposed when you have a young child in the council estate growing up alongside another child in the marble slab Islington property. That’s what A-Cold-Wall* really is. It’s about both of those tangible physical experiences being surrounded by a materiality, be it pebbled ash or Victorian Brick.