SS15 sees the Casely-Hayford father and son duo look to Art Intervention to inspire their design process of the painterly versus the graphic

SS15 sees the Casely-Hayford father and son duo look to Art Intervention to inspire their design process of the painterly versus the graphic. Engaging with classic English menswear shapes that have become integral to the recent normcore  (stylized blandness) movement prominent in London and New York, Casely-Hayford looks at ways of dissecting and working directly onto culturally significant garments that are defined by their normality. The duo moves the sartorial into the anarchic, the anarchic into sportswear and sportswear into the formal.

Displacement and juxtaposing forms are the currency of the post-modern generation and through SS15’s‘Art Intervention’ the father and son present their own interpretation of this movement, which takes the ordinary and readdresses its significance and meaning through re-appropriation.

Graphic pinstripes suits and oversized pinstriped coats play on the uniform of city businessman, and are forced into the realm of punk through asymmetrical zips and unconventional silhouettes. The classic chesterfield coat, the visual currency of skinheads, is deconstructed and then reconstructed using Georgette transparent worsted mixed with nylon – giving the impression of the formal, but providing the relaxed, lightweight feeling of sportswear.

Art intervention’s true focus is the idea of the painterly versus graphic, bringing the human touch and an organic quality to a generation, which negates nostalgia and searches instead for the immediate, direct and graphic. The SS15 collection directly converges both worlds to illustrate that modernity does not have to mean rejecting the human touch.