COAG x Alterist Launch Party | London Fashion Week AW25
Words by Molly Thatcher, Photos by Bukunmi Enirayetan
Alterist is a collective of designers and artists, brought together by the common goal: to inspire change in consumer culture through fashion. The launch event for their London Fashion Week showcase was held at COAG (Camden Open Air Gallery). Marking the start of a three-day pop-up which allowed visitors to shop collections by Alterist designers, including MINSKI, Timothy Midnight; STUART TREVOR, White Weft, Material Response, 8 Ball Custom Vintage, The Sophist, UIIBA Club, Manufactured Fiction, GLIDE, and ITERUM Studio. The launch was DJed by Materialresponse and later hosted performances by YSEE and Cheapcuts. The setting was perfect: a white cube gallery between two Camden Highstreet souvenir shops, the walls covered in installation street art and comic book pop art. A white-out piano with graffiti lay underneath snarling blue and pink cat heads with melting yellow eyes.
Attendees wore earth tones, orange blush high on the cheekbone, two-tone bleached hair with red leather coats and flat-footed peasant boots in imitation kidskin; invariably held brown beer bottles in their hands. At the beginning of the night, YSEE wandered among them in a patchwork denim trench coat like a blue flame. Beats from the decks wavered through the air. A worktable was set up, complete with spray cans, fabric sheer, pins, paints, stencils, and custom screen print patches—tools for Saturday when MINSKI, Timothy Midnight, STUART TREVOR, and White Weft would work to upcycle clothes brought by visitors. The brown card labels on the pieces also listed how long each designer spent on that item, also foregrounding the act of upcycling as much as the resulting art.
Throughout each designers’ collection, I sensed a democracy in their approach to materials. There was the desire to create clothes from otherwise discarded materials and honour the uniqueness of vintage items. Simultaneously there was an embrace of upcycling's aesthetic byproducts. Minski’s reworked waistcoats and pinstripe trousers, for example, have harlequin diamonds of antique lace with the hemming serger tails still hanging from the points. Cream tails blend into the antique lace, effortlessly merging authentic vintage with the anachronistic evidence of its alteration and reuse. Indeed, the designers seem connected in a playfulness towards the combining of fabrics: artificial snakeskin and brocade flowers clash loudly on upcycled jackets; elsewhere, panels of cream leather and lined teddy fleece together on a pair of trousers evoke more furniture than clothing.
Dorota Bojanowska’s vintage, blue workwear overalls became canvases for her chaotic screen-printed designs. The consciously documented care and human workmanship that has gone into each piece, represents notions of the body recreating itself through discarded fabrics. UIIBA Club’s metallic pull-tabs and denim knot together in belts like vertebrae. The Sophist’s embroidered capillaries and repeated motto of “Capillaries scream connecting the pathways of life.” Fashion woven together with the same ecstatic care as the tendons and arteries that knit the fleshy components of our human bodies. The beauty and imperfection of the handmade, reposition the body as the primary site of creativity. That is the primary focus of this pop-up: a showcase for Alterist artists to create wearable art in real time. By putting the creative body on display as a working organism, responding directly to the fabrics and clothing brought in by other individuals, Alterist creates a space of self-sustaining fashion during LFW AW25.