Aitor and the three lions

Aitor Throup is a designer we have been following for some time and his every move causes a flurry of excitement. Graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2006, Throup has since gone on to work with Stone Island (remember the Modular jacket) and contributed to the Topman Black Trouser Project (creating the only offering worth getting excited about). As previously posted I was fortunate to listen in to his conversation with Sarah Mower at the V&A last year and this only intensified my admiration for him. Hearing him talk about his work you really can see how he is both an artist and designer, solving the problems his mind creates with focus and attention to detail and thirst for processes - his comic book scrawlings transform into reality for the runway (or however he so happens to choose to display them). Throup gave great insight into his design process and what he said only made me marvel at him more. He left the audience with an exciting piece of news, that he had just signed up with Umbro (one of the biggest footballing brands in the UK) in a creative consultant role...fast for forward a few months and thanks to a reader pointing us in the direction of the umbro blog we can hear what he has been upto..working on the new England football kit.

The truth is, the concept of fashion itself doesn’t really interest or inspire me. I find some aspects of the fashion industry quite frivolous, and a lot of things about how it functions contradict how I work.

There is so much more to good menswear design than fashion (of course we can appreciate the frivolous side from time to time) and this is why I like writing about it so much.

All my work is centered around the idea of inventing new processes and new objects within an on-going study of the human anatomy. Working on true performance apparel like the new England kit provided a great platform to apply some of those ideas.

The above extract summarises exactly why I got butterflies in my stomach when I read this piece of news. Aitor and his design team built this garment with an understanding of how the body works and how it moves, specifically when playing football to create something which moves with the body, like a second skin. I for one would love to see this prototype make it in to production followed by a full collaborative collection sometime soon.