VENEZIANA

This started with a venetian blind. With the wooden slats, with the way they all tilt at once and let the world through in strips. There was only one question, and it had no obvious answer: what if that structure were moulded to a body? Fifteen parallel pleats per sleeve, a rigid bellows that opens and closes in laminae, cuffs that hold a 30 cm circle and do not give. It is a blind with shoulders.

The whole collection lives inside Victor Turner’s liminal state — the interval of the rite of passage, when you have already left one place and have not yet arrived at the next. The blind is the window of that state. On this side is the world from before; on the other, the new world that only appears once you step out. And a blind is neither a wall nor an open window: it is the object that decides how much gets seen at a time.

Plenty of people will look at this and say Japan — armour, samurai, geisha. That was not the intention and I am not going to claim what I did not draw. If it turned out well that way, it was chance. I say so because an owned accident is worth more than an inspiration invented after the fact.

The rigidity is no sewing trick either: it is the material. A thick synthetic of the kind used in leather goods, not a garment textile — that is where the laminae that never fall and the tunnels the light passes through come from. The croquis is dated 27 April 2025 and the piece was finished on 26 November: seven months from paper to this, and it is still a prototype. Prototypes are exercises taken to the extreme; that is what they are for. This one turned out too good to stop here, and unfinished enough not to lie.