Bianca Saunders managed to go to a Man Ray exhibition in Paris last September—lucky thing! Also a show of Erwin Wurm photographs—lucky thing! “It was a massive refresh,” she remembers, fuel for the burst of creativity she channeled into her new, surrealism-inspired collection back in her studio at the Sarabande Foundation in London.
Actually, in those days before travel between London and Paris effectively became illegal for most purposes, Saunders had been there to exhibit her own artworks—suspended wired sculptures of clothes without men in them—at Drawing a Blank, a joint multidisciplinary event for young artists. Its curator, Ben Broome, has described it as something “between a rave and an art show.”
That short spell of freedom energized Saunders to progress more experimentally with ideas spun out of surrealism, reapplied to the textiles and tailored structures she’s meticulously built as her brand’s templates. The inspiration behind the short film, made with Daniel Sannwald, is Jean Cocteau’s 1930 movie, The Blood of a Poet.
The origin of Saunders’s research has always been her interest in analyzing how clothes behave on men’s bodies as they move, sit, and slouch. Her pattern cutting subtly incorporates her observations of creases, twists and turns of seams, and suchlike. Questioning the conventions of generic garments releases her to think about, say, making a bomber jacket A-line or recasting the idea of a ruffle-fronted dinner shirt into a really chic rippled technique. She furthered the trompe l’oeil “gilet” shoulder of her jackets too. She’s been steadily drawing a cult following for this, even in the midst of the pandemic. Who’s responding? “I’m really going for the smarter guy who’s maybe an artist, who thinks in a bit more detail about clothes,” she says. “What’s been really amazing is that the customers I set out to get, are the ones that I am getting. The ones who sit between masculinity and being quite open.”
This time, she taught herself to make prints of creased fabric and superimpose them on a suit and knitwear. Spending time more or less alone and having to DIY processes that might in the usual rush of business be passed out to specialists gave her the chance to concentrate on tweaking shapes and reusing textile scraps. In fact, she’s pretty happy with the way things have gone for her over the past year—she’s had a lot of attention, was invited to be part of GucciFest, and her things are selling. Enough’s enough, though, she sighs, with an eye roll: “I can’t wait for us all to get out of lockdown, and for people to be able to wear smarter clothes again.” And so say all of us.
