This month Zoe Bradley Design collaborated with premier Japanese department store, Hankyu in Osaka to create seven stunning windows to launch the new season collections for Autumn Winter 2015. Taking inspiration from the textures and embellishment that many designers were showing for the coming season, we pushed paper to its limits and created oversized couture style gowns and headpieces to bring the dramatic windows to life.
Highlights include a deep claret pom pom gown, which tumbles and cascades from a gold mannequin, perched bird-like from a high swing and a voluminous Hydrangea gown complete with headpiece that fills an entire window. The shear size of the enormous windows, played to Zoe Bradley's strengths of over scaling the silhouettes from the 4 metre high dresses to an expansive blossom headpiece that stretches across the window and the magical swirling butterfly headpiece that grows from the mannequin’s head rotating across the window. A vision of fantastical fluttering wings, where each butterfly is adorned with a single Swarovski crystal.
The creations were very fashion focused as we set out to imagine seven ‘Gorgeous’ windows that takes you on a journey through a magical garden from the hundreds of colourful drop flowers to a huge flowering rose branch.
For the first time, Zoe Bradley also collaborated with the worlds leading crystal brand, Atelier Swarovski. Hundreds of sparkling crystals were applied to the dresses and the butterflies. The effect was spectacular, as it gave real depth and sparkle to the bespoke creations and re-enforced the fashion trend of embellishment. Each crystal was painstakingly applied by hand. The whole showcase of the windows was about craftsmanship and decoration and yet again showed how the medium of hundreds of sheets of flat paper can be realised into something very unique and visually exciting.
The work was on an enormous scale and the Zoe Bradley team simply could not have achieved such magnificent creation without the manpower, skill and patience of the Hankyu team who we worked alongside in their Kyoto workshop in the run up the installation. This has been our biggest creation to date and probably has set some kind of world record on creating the largest number of windows made solely from paper. We hope you can see from the images the craftsmanship and skill that took place in creating these magnificent windows.
www.zoebradley.com
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www.hankyu-dept.co.jp
