Collateral Concepts 3rd Iteration: Origins

[Chinorlz]

[Chinorlz]

[Chinorlz]

[Chinorlz]

[Chinorlz]

[Chinorlz]

Full online presentation in the coming week!

Thanks to everyone for their patience!

[Faust]

WOOT!

[DamageX]

I can't wait to see your new work! The preview photos look very enticing!

[smennen]

Great work, Albert! This is a huge inspiration for someone like myself who is just learning to cut & sew.

[Chinorlz]

Thank you all for the kind words and support.

The lookbook has been posted and I will start a thread in the discussions section for details of the collection as well as to encourage dialogue about the collection.

THESE IMAGES ARE FOR STYLEZEITGEIST.COM ONLY AND ARE NOT MEANT FOR POSTING ON OTHER BLOGS/SITES/MOOD BOARDS AT DESIGN HOUSES WITHOUT EXPLICIT PERMISSION FROM COLLATERAL

[Chinorlz]

Collateral Concepts 3rd Iteration: Origins

[Chinorlz]

A bit about where each piece's ideas have come from as well as the concepts behind the collection as a whole for your reading pleasure:


A number of the pieces this season have personal roots as well as roots in the individual’s military experience which is an aspect of war that I have a great interest in. The ivory from the piano keys (and the ebony wood counterpart for outside-US sales) is 60-125 years old and thus many of the pieces span the major wars both of the US and of the world. The pieces are of course US GI style dog tags with the smaller removable panel like the real deal. At the same time the ivory is my personal link to my childhood I was classically trained on piano so sort of a three-point approach to the design taking it to a deeper level.

The collection has a lot of seam work that isn't directly anatomical but instead follows the body's lines of movement. The leather jacket's seams are like that with the seams running through the neck and down the arm as well as from the neck and arcing around the front torso. The shirts are done in a similar concept and the patterns are cut so that the torso has a gentle hourglass form to it and is also contoured along the center back seam to follow the natural S curve of the spine. Fitted while still being very much comfortable. I felt like this approach to seam work and construction lends to an even more natural look and feel and is a departure from the "anatomical" design so harped on these days. The shirts will be offered in a short and long sleeve version with the long sleeve having a continuation of the pattern used for the short sleeve. Each shirt is made of 3 pieces. Colors will be slate, mist, and black. The first two are custom blends I’ve mixed and created in-house.

One version of the short sleeve shirts will be left white and will be rust-dyed using magnets and iron powder. This is a concept I came up with after remembering elementary/middle school science projects where you sprinkle the filings on a surface and put a magnet underneath to show the magnetic field. The magnet is placed under the upper left chest and is a high strength 9mm round magnet. The filings are scattered on top and they gather around the magnet on top of the fabric. This is left to rust in place and the result looks like a close contact gunshot wound with the furthest rust specks looking like powder burn. The inspiration for this piece is George Eastman of Eastman Kodak. He was a big contributor to my Alma Mater University of Rochester and not only was he a big photography pioneer (leading to my "developing" process of the iron oxidizing in place over 24 hrs) but the legend says that the way he committed suicide was he went to his physician and had him trace out the outline of his heart. He then went home, put a gun in the center of that and shot himself. So this piece is sort of a homage to him while using a dye technique not yet used by others (at least that I am aware of) before this.

The scarf is based off of the Senninbari belt that the Japanese soldiers would wear around their waist as they entered battle. The belts classically had a thousand hand-sewn knots put into them and also had little sewn in charms and small pouches to hold little mementos. I chose the fabric I did for one face to represent these small knots while the rayon/linen on the other face of the scarf is something classically military in terms of a fabric blend. The center of the scarf on the "knots" side has a long curving seam and in the center of the seam it splits to reveal a hidden pocket in the center. The scarf can be worn classically and I've contoured it to be more ergonomic so that the center is thicker (to be placed at the back of the neck) with the two ends tapering down for easy wrapping. The scarf can also be ironed out (or left scrunched up) and wrapped/slung around the waist. It will double around most waists and you can tie a knot at the end and the portion with the pocket sits either tight around the waist or slung lower at the hip as desired to hold a small wallet/phone or what have you. This would be the more modern example of the belt holding what is valuable to us now. The scarf is constructed out of white fabrics and then object dyed with each of the three fabrics (the rayon/linen, the dotted fabric, the pocket fabric) all taking up the dye in slightly different ways. The result is a scarf that is one color but each face is slightly different in terms of the tones as if you chose fabrics that matched. The scarf will be available in arterial red, venous red and midnight black (very very dark blue). These three colors are again, in-house blends.

The leather I chose for the bags I wanted to keep scarred and branded so that it is purposefully imperfect. Leather, like a lot of our food these days is so separated from the origin and many can't even eat fish on the bone because of this. The scarred leather with the branding and healed cuts and scrapes keep the owner mindful of the provenance of the material used and also gives each piece a unique character. The scarred leather I actually only was able to obtain about 8 hides or so of and so that leather will be limited to 8 bags. The other leather is a slightly thicker and a deep black with mild pebbling to it. Strapping on the bags is water buffalo. The inspiration for the bags is the MRI “cage” placed over a person when being imaged. The handles are actually a continuous strap that can be unhooked and removed from the bag and relooped around the two loops at either end of the bag for shoulder carry use. Fully lined. All hardware is silver and zippers are RiRi.

There will also be a card case constructed out of shell cordovan and the leather then branded (custom made branding iron) with a classic Japanese Enso circle. I painted the circle and had the branding iron created for me based off of this. This seemingly simple case embodies a tremendous amount of handwork, minimalist construction with inherent complexity (echoed by the Enso circle) and material second to none (shell cordovan requires 6 months to tan and create correctly and currently the best in the world comes from Horween Tannery right here in the USA. Only 2 panels of it measuring around 1.5 – 2 square feet each can be collected from the equine hide. It’s the most resilient, densest and most luxurious leather that can be used). In short: simple but complex.

A belt constructed out of leather from J&E Sedgewick tannery in England is also offered. The tannery is 110 years old and they continue to produce their leather in a very traditional way with hand dying and hand polishing of each piece. The belt closes with a single-piece silver double hook hardware that is constructed in the studio and then hand fitted to each belt strap.

The Collateral tags this season are new as well; using washable leather that I hand stamp in each letter both for the bags and for the garments. It is a lot cleaner and subtle and continues the minimalism of the collection.

[Chinorlz]

Lookbook has been posted in the Seasonal Collections Section of SZ

[magic]

stunning, amazing, respect.

[mortalveneer]

Beautiful. That elephant leather is sublime.