September 18, 2020 |
What’s one way to keep the kids entertained during lockdown? Here’s a thought: how about letting them make your latest collection? This was exactly the idea of husband-and-wife design-duo Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, who encouraged their two daughters – aged eight and eleven – to create earrings out of smashed china, sew together textile scraps into mismatched patterns and drape fabrics onto mannequins that would create the skeletons of this season’s silhouettes.
This working-with-what-you-have ethos also rubbed off on the parents, too, who created this season’s Preen By Thornton Bregazzi mood board using miscellaneous items that were left lying around their home and worked with deadstock fabrics from previous seasons to put the collection together.
Looking to the Japanese art of Kintsugi – built on the idea that a broken object that has been repaired is more valuable than its original form – corsetry tops, slip dresses and jumpers were collaged from various fabrics and materials. Jewellery artist Vicki Sarge was in charge of transforming the earrings made by the kids into more fully-realised variations, with hints of blue and white porcelain dangling ever so elegantly in choppy shards.
The collection was brought to life with a hazy film directed by Juliette Larthe, who followed her daughter and her pals as they went for a sun-kissed punting trip down a mossy canal, each in their own pretty frock, without a single grey cloud in sight. Blissful.
Photographs courtesy of Preen by Thornton Bregarzzi.
