The Art of Allusion / An Interview with Thomas Tait

Thomas Tait’s Canadian status is but a trifling technicality in his standing in London’s new school of cerebral design; the city has adopted him, quick to catch on to his clear-cut concepts back in 2010, when at just 22, Tait emerged as the youngest ever student to graduate from the MA Womenswear course at Central Saint Martins. SS11 set a pitch-perfect tone true to a taste for tactful tailoring: concrete cuts carved of molten lines. Tait’s was a veracious vision that has only emerged more erudite with each season, FW15 marking his first show since landing the laudable LVMH Young Designer Prize last year – an artful exploration of the female presence on film and, conceivably, his most cultured collection to date.

It’s a précis preluded by a sombre palette, modest mini dresses decked in jet, micro pleats patched with severed screengrabs and arms lacquered by lengthy gauntlets. Swathed satins appear to drape and dapple over the torso, though their eerie precision would hit to a more deliberate placement, all in Tait’s tribute to the cinematic stills of photographer Gregory Crewdson. Dario Argento’s ‘70s horror, Suspiria, also makes the cut; liquid contours creep in crimson, tracing the body with remarkable sensuality despite every inch remaining concealed. Color speaks in shades of CMYK, silk two pieces licked in lemon, and mensy suede jacket suits in retina-burning reds – pants flared to hyperbolic proportions. Hardware serves as a signature of severity, silver ring-pulls and circle buckles bolstering belts and zips, while cartoonish collars are punched with metal motifs. Using silhouette as his synopsis, Tait’s own drama dares to unfold; perverting the pointed eyes of the voyeur, Tait revolts the warped romanticising of the fated femme fatale, and with that, is made a master of his genre.

REBEKKA AYRES: How did the fashion in Canada prepare you for life in London? How did the two compare?

THOMAS TAIT: It prepared me in a very specific way which wasn’t so immediately relevant when I moved to London because it was more in terms of the educational environment. I came from a really technical school in Canada – it wasn’t an art school in any way. They taught you how to make clothes more than anything else. When I came to London, I started my Master’s at Central Saint Martins about two weeks after I moved and I didn’t have a huge amount of time to adjust to the city. I came straight from living with my parents and I’d never lived anywhere else outside of Canada, so it was a bit of a shock.

RA: Was there much of a scene back at home?

TT: Well, I’m from Montreal and Montreal is quite fashionable for Canada. People see it as a European city because it’s bilingual. There are lots of young people, it’s got a strong music scene and a great nightlife, so the people there are probably a bit more adventurous in the way that they present themselves compared to somewhere like Toronto, which is fairly corporate. It’s also a city of contrasts, with the dual nature of the French and English, and the Victorian architecture sitting alongside the modern. But there is a scene, for sure. One of the things I remember is that just before I left Montreal, there was this this trendy nightlife scene going and the crowd were very ‘pop’ and electric in the way they dressed. But when I went back a couple of years later, I was shocked because everybody had jumped onto some kind of minimalist bandwagon. Suddenly everybody was really chic, it was funny.

RA: What were you like growing up? What were you into?

TT: Well, I didn’t really know anything about fashion until quite late on. I didn’t grow up right in the city center – I grew up in the suburbs outside of Montreal, so lived a very…I don’t want to say ‘secluded’ life, but I was a very private person. I kept to myself. I didn’t really invite my friends over to my house. I was a bit of a dreamer. I was always illustrating when I was a kid and I was very particular about how I wanted to dress myself. I had a very clear idea of how I wanted to see things.

RA: So there was no big epiphany? No awakening that this was what you wanted to do?

TT: No, I don’t have that story of having a really glamorous mom or having a dad who’s a tailor – nothing like that. I was really quite distanced from fashion in terms of my upbringing, but also because it wasn’t so readily available. You couldn’t buy Vogue at the local store. Fashion wasn’t so available.

RA: FW15 marks your first season since winning the LVMH Prize in 2014. In what way do you think your designs have evolved during the past 12 months?

TT: For me, it’s affirmed the importance of sensitivity towards commercial viability in fashion, especially right now. As an independent brand, I can’t afford to disregard the value of consistency in product offering, which is something that I undertake naturally when developing a new collection. I also felt that the surge in media interest has motivated me to reconnect with some of the core values of my brand, which perhaps I demonstrated more directly during my earlier seasons. Elements of my work which may have gone unnoticed before the win now feel more relevant than ever. It’s exciting to reassess my past and innovate with a fresh perspective.

RA: Your reference points for this season included photographer Gregory Crewdson and the film Suspiria. Can you elaborate on the ideas which underpin the collection?

TT: Gregory is an artist who has inspired me for many years, not only because of the underlying feeling of super-nature within his work, but also for his remarkably intricate and exacting process. I’m fascinated with the precision of his ideas and how he follows through each project or work with such a clear sense of discipline. I referenced Dario Argento more generally last season as I was particularly keen to investigate the glamorization of women, especially in the context of horror. Argento is clearly a master in this field and demonstrates an incredible approach to colour, sound and staging. His films skip so beautifully between the artificial, the natural and supernatural.

RA: SS15 saw you broach the idea of sexiness for the first time, which you said was not so much your comfort zone, garnering an ‘unsexy sexiness’ as perceived by women, as opposed to the male gaze. How does sexiness play out in FW15, or even in future collections at Thomas Tait?

TT: I tend to design for women who really dress for themselves, rather than for the admiration of others. Women are such complex creatures who have endlessly variating ideas of body image. I’m not interested in celebrating the female body in a generic way that might cater more typically to the eye of an admirer. Rather, I like to discuss sexiness with women from a point of view that has perhaps gone unspoken in recent times. But it’s huge and highly complex subject which I’m not veteran in discussing…basically, I don’t see T&A as the long or the short of what makes women sexy.

RA: How do you hope your designs make women feel?

TT: I’m always very interested in the psychology of how women see themselves, how they interact with clothing and their reaction to that. The customers I deal with on a personal basis vary quite dramatically in terms of age, cultural background and interests, as well as body shape and size, so it’s nice to see how the reaction changes so dramatically when they try on the pieces. One characteristic that unites my clients is that they’re all about dressing for themselves, rather than for an ideal that others deem attractive. They’re very strong-minded in their sense of individuality and tend to be drawn to fashion from a personal approach, rather than seeing it as personal advertising. I definitely want the women who wear my clothes to feel a certain level of confidence and there to be a certain level of comfort. I think people respond to that sense of soft structuring and accommodating the body – having that distance between themselves and the garment. I wrap the clothes around the body in a very strategic manner, so you’re aware of why something is fitting a certain way. Working in fashion, especially at the commercial end, you realize very quickly that a lot of people focus so much on what they’re unhappy about with their bodies, rather than looking for features to celebrate. Often it’s about taking an unconventional approach that’s in some way avant-garde, perhaps by showing a lot of skin, like the spring collection, where I used a lot of transparency – that’s obviously not immediately approachable to a large consumer base. I guess, overall, the clothes that I make have the capacity to really resonate with people.

RA: It clearly does – you were the guest womenswear designer selected to present at this year’s Pitti Uomo. Can you tell me about the concept for your exhibition?

TT: It was a really fun project and actually much bigger than I’d imagined it would be. It presented an opportunity for me to delve back into my archive and re-innovate all the past pieces I felt particularly attached to but perhaps didn’t quite progress to the stage that I’d wanted. You always feel like you’re abandoning one of your babies when you scrap something. As a designer, there’s always that piece you’re really wanting to redo, but perhaps you don’t have the financial capacity to achieve it. I like the idea of seeing the re-innovated garment in direct comparison to the original archive piece, and that was a very transparent and honest way to invite people to look at my past body of work and how it has naturally transformed over time. One focus which you could see in the way that I displayed the garments was the idea of creative communication. It was a way to open the door to conversation, especially with it being an exhibition, rather than a runway show; it was staged for a longer period of time, people were having food and drink, so it was nice to be able to just sit down and catch up. I think people really reacted to the idea that it felt very lose and friendly.

RA: Competition is so high that for young designers now there’s a huge amount of pressure to work ungodly hours for free. How might you like to see the industry change?

TT: I certainly think the structure of fashion business needs to be communicated in schools – I really noticed that coming from Canada. The education I’d come from was very technical and pragmatic, and then I came to London, to Central Saint Martins, which was a much more creative environment. I’d made that choice deliberately because I wanted that experience, but I began to realize, especially having design interns working with me every season, that the schools don’t teach you anything about business. They’re not really teaching you about the strategy that’s involved or all of the extra-curricular demands outside of design. There are huge social responsibilities because it’s so embedded in media and it’s something that really can’t be ignored, but it’s not really emphasized by the educational system. I think it truly is a hindrance to young designers.

RA: So it means you can never stop if you want to stay in the game.

TT: Yeah. I think the colleges also have a certain amount of responsibility in terms of how many students they take on; I heard that there are something like 8,000 BA graduates for Womenswear in one year. 8,000. And that’s just for Womenswear – 8,000 Womenswear BA graduates a year. There’s probably one paying job a year that pays enough for you to actually live in London. I think it’s really important to prepare the students for the fact that they’re probably all going to end up fighting for the same job, or you’ll have to make your own by setting up a label, which not everybody has the ability or drive to do. I also think the modelling industry could use some kind of unionization. I love the girls I work with, but at the moment it’s such a weird and lose system. I mean, we could talk about more general concerns like weight or age, but alongside that there are more general duties of care that should be implemented, like how the models travel to castings. There are these young girls traveling around strange cities alone, miles away from their families, and all they have is a map – it breaks my heart. And I notice at my castings, the girls are just so happy because there’s food! It’s such a rarity for their wellbeing to be considered.

RA: It’s clear you live and breathe for your practice. How have you come to have such drive?

TT: That’s a very nice thing for you to say. I don’t know, I always think of sharks: sharks always have to push forward in order to breathe – that’s how their bodies work. Ever since I can remember, I’ve always wanted to push forward. I don’t see life as something that’s ticking down to zero – I always try to see it as something you’re building up to a maximum. I guess it’s my determination comes from curiosity – a natural ambition to succeed. It’s just something that I have in me, and not necessarily just when it comes to fashion, but it applies to all facets of my life.

RA: What do you do when it all stops then? What’s your world outside of fashion?

TT: Mmm, unfortunately there’s not much, I’m afraid. Actually, Melanie Rickey did a video interview with me a few years ago, so it was being filmed but she hadn’t told me what the questions were beforehand. She asked me, ‘What are your hobbies outside of work?’ I was so embarrassed, I went completely red because I didn’t have anything to say! I guess whenever I have time off I just like to hang out with my friends, go to the pub and just do normal things that twenty-something year-olds do. And I like to sleep in whenever I possibly can – that’s always good. Honestly, outside of my career, I just sound really, really dull…But oh, I just got a juicer! I’m really excited about that...