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Cooperative Designs Womenswear A/W10

A strachen blochen of linear grids takes over the Proud Gallery off the Strand.

PhotographyAmy Gwatkin

For their first on-schedule London Fashion Week presentation, Cooperative Designs still takes us slightly off the beaten track to the Proud Gallery where David White covered walls with panels of monochrome grid patterns to echo the strict lines that have been reined in this season's collection. In other ways though, other things have been pushed further within Cooperative Designs' knitwear such as a dreadlocked mohair escaping the gridded lines, and yarns get interwoven with jersey and rough wools for a more textured effect. The silhouettes have always been on the loose and louche side of things but there was greater exaggeration too in the cardigans and shrugs to form the sort of cocoons you wouldn't mind hibernating in for the winter. A complete look also progressed with wild knitted hats by Noel Stewart, ruffled leather bags by Pavel Ivancic and more graphic jewellery by Corrie Williamson. To accompany the collection, a film by White Night was shown as well as a zine that sees Dorothee Hagemann and Annalisa Dunn asking London creatives to shoot or wear a piece from the A/W 10-11 collection in their own way with contributions from Fred Butler, Louise Gray, Ben Rayner, Iekeliene Stange and more.

Dazed Digital: It felt like you were refining somethings but letting other aspects go wild - what was the starting point for this?
Dorothee Hagemann: We always start with graphics and also had this desire to be wild and we were trying to capture this.
Annalisa Dunn: We went to a lot of art galleries like Frieze and saw a lot of expressionist art, photographs of Gerdhard Richter where he has really har architecture but has also poured oil over this.

DD: The balance works really well because you have these strict lines and then the shaggy elements.
Annalisa: Those are called our 'wild knits'. It's kind of our knitted version of fur in a way where it has that same volume and high impact.
Dorothee: With the grids, there's mohair coming out so that there's something wild escaping the grid.

DD: The setup of the gallery is really great.
Annalisa: We think this may be our dream shop! David White did the set for us.

DD: With the film, it's a very clean and direct representation of the collection - was that intentional?
Annalisa: We realise during fashion week, everyone is busy and people just want to see clothes and we wanted a clean record of the collection for ourselves too.

DD: What was the idea behind asking other people to represent themselves in the collection? 
Annalisa: It was kind of two-pronged really. It was to show that London is so collaborative and I don't think anywhere else is like that. Then the other was as a designer, is to see how other people see your clothes and it's kind of wonderful that people can make it their own. It's also to show that if you don't work in fashion, you don't realise how much influence a stylist or a photographer can have on pictures.

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