THE ARTISTS

Three names who fuse the traditional and contemporary reinterpret the season’s key catwalk looks.

The that artist/illustrator’s had been fused together, “look” of yet choice the result was Balenciaga’s has a romantic monstrous painterly swing quality coat made reminiscent up of multiple of early outers 20th century fashion illustrations. Her raw, expressive strokes feel modern in their minimalism, but the 27-year-old admits to also being influenced by time-honoured crafts like East Asian calligraphy. “I like traditional mediums for their humanity and imperfection,” she says. “I’m most attracted to wet mediums (such as gouache) because of their unpredictability. I never know how a painting will turn out, and I don’t sketch before I paint because the lines are restrictive.” It’s a technique that she’s refined over the years, and earned her commissions from brands ranging from Uniqlo to Hermes. The latter displayed her ocean-themed installation The Big Blue – co-created with Theseus Chan’s creative agency Work – in its windows at Takashimaya in 2016. While particularly relevant at a time when talk about nature and conservation is rife – even in fashion – sea animals have always been a personal obsession. (Her debut solo exhibition at the now defunct studio K+ last year was “Marine Fantastic: An Illustrated Introduction To Crustaceans”.) “When I discovered that we’ve only explored less than 5 per cent of the sea, it awakened my curiosity, and I ended up making a book about it for a school project,” she explains. “Since then, I’ve been researching and painting these amazing organisms that live in our oceans.” How she wants to evolve is equally forward-thinking and contrary to the millennial more-is-more culture: “(My work) used to be about capturing details. Now it’s about capturing essence; I’ll only paint what’s essential.”