“Well, I think the last time we spoke, I was knitting gimp masks… and making other frightening things!” says Gui Rosa with a smirk. We’re in her white-box Bethnal Green studio, beside a rail of bright, patchworked pieces that splice yarn with strips of leather and swatches of lace. Indeed, our last proper conversation was around five years ago, in the early days of the pandemic, when the London-based Portuguese designer had just graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA programme. Her practice was then anchored in the seemingly dichotomous – not to mention deliciously weird – exploration of how clothes spun from skeins of fuzzy yarn could evoke kink rather than comfort. Think: colourful crocheted sock boots crafted for high-fashion lot lizards; matching mohair bodysuits and crochet wigs inspired by woolies – people who get off on the scratch of wool against bare skin.
These aren’t terms or references you’d typically pair with knitwear, but they underscored the directionally twisted lilt that has coloured Rosa’s vision since the outset, and her knack for tweaking and challenging the twee expectations of medium and materials. In the time that’s passed since then, Rosa’s vision has matured without becoming sanitised. The sleaze may have softened, but a strange, subversive sex appeal remains.
Her first full collection, presented on the London Fashion Week schedule as the latest addition to the British Fashion Council’s Newgen scheme, is testament to that. Take a striped merino cardigan, that might otherwise pass for something lifted from the wardrobe of an ’80s librarian, as a case in point. Lifting the blush pink piece from the rail, what strikes most is both its weight and its rustle – the result of its slashed construction, with each knitted strip trimmed with eyelet-punched leather and rejoined with tiny brass rings, leaving slivers of flesh visible between them. Or a vermilion jumper attached to a figure-skimming midi-skirt composed of swooping, whipstitched panels of buttery taupe calfskin and sheer lace. “It was really about finding ways of merging tougher materials with these lightweight fabrics,” Rosa says. “Bringing these industrial brass elements to this fine, dainty knit – bringing together the cashmere cardigan and the bondage.”
Whether in these more graphic pieces or dresses assembled from freeform, expressionist blotches of crochet, Rosa’s knack lies in unexpected combinations of textiles and techniques. “I’m really into making my own fabrics,” the designer explains. “I guess that’s the reason I initially studied print, and taught myself how to crochet. I always want to be able to have something that I can’t just purchase. The idea of buying, I don’t know, a beaded fabric is such a cop-out to me,” she says with a hearty laugh.
It’s an approach that demands real graft – not to mention a mathematical understanding of material allowances and tension – to pull off. “With all the chiffon and organza we use, we actually mount it onto transparent tulle,” Rosa explains. This reinforcement keeps the delicate fabrics from distorting under the weight of the leather panels attached to them. Elsewhere, a toggle-fronded jumpsuit is entirely crocheted by hand from black bungee cords.
The work Rosa produces is serious, but she doesn’t take it too seriously – there’s a spirit of lightness, frou and camp that makes it all the more compelling. That was felt in the rollicking show the designer staged this afternoon in the glass-canopied ballroom of the St James’s Court Hotel in Westminster. “We’re really going for this sort of deranged debutante ball vibe,” she says – a cheeky nod to her own entrance into London Fashion Week society. “We’ve created this mirror-clad scene, and the girls are going to be walking around lipstick in hand, defacing mirrors. It’s going to be chaos,” she adds, a twinkle in her eye. “The girls are going to unleash the animal within.”
