I first encountered the work of Hormazd Narielwalla gracing the walls of "A Fairytale About Fashion", an exhibition which ran during the festive season 0f 2008 at the EXIT gallery. Narielwalla's Dead Man’s Patterns was a design story that excited my sartorial imagination and I have kept a close on his artistic development ever since. Just last week, the current LCF PhD student informed me of the various recent advancements that have helped propel his work to a wider audience. These include a new website, fresh illustrative undertakings, an exhibition and another book. Over the coming months I will no doubt fill you in on every one of these nuggets of news but for now, I'd just like to share another body of his work, Trams. As soon as I visited his new site my eye was drawn to this series of artworks. Through a combination of photography, his own sketches and digital composition collages, this series is yet another playful collection of artwork that truly excites. The driving concept for this body of work is to capture a new-age dandy stuck between the past and the present. All the while questioning how a man should dress. These characters have a dandy-esque approach to life, spotless, immaculate and seemingly effortlessly stylish...
As you should all know by now, the artists work originates from sets of bespoke patterns. These patterns have recorded a history of intimate dialogues of customer measurements and fittings over a lifetime but no longer have any practical use to the cutter and are often discarded. Narielwalla takes these fragile pieces of parchment out of their original context and breathes fresh life in to them. The creases and careful folds, finely traced pencil marks and measurements are reimagined. The patterns are reinterpreted and resurrected. In Trams, Narielwalla has once again foraged his way through tailoring archives and shaken a heady cocktail of visual methods to narrate untold stories. I'm left contemplating the modern dandy.
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