Wooden clothes feature in Iceland-based fashion designer Sruli Recht's Autumn Winter 2013 menswear collection.
Layers of walnut wood were divided into triangles then mounted on a textile base to create a pliable material that forms the geometric shapes of the garments.
Most of the items in Sruli Recht's collection are constructed from a single pattern and piece of material, with sweaters woven from complete unravelled skeins of wool and cotton blend.
The charred colour scheme of black and grey is broken only by a yellow ochre suit and a matching pair of suede shoes that have the patterns of the wooden items repeated on their soles.
Eiderdown collected from abandoned nests on the beaches in the Westfjörds of Iceland, metal mesh and reindeer skin are all included in the material palette.
Recht also created a ring from skin surgically removed from his own belly for the collection - see it here.
Other items of jewellery in the collection combine black and white acrylic resin with fool's gold and peacock ore specimens, fused in a process akin to fossilisation and hand sculpted by jewellery artist Jade Mellor.
The wooden textiles were created with German designer Elisa Strozyk, whose wooden carpet project we featured a while ago.
Small oxidised metal pins for fastening collars and chunky wooden boots also feature in the collection, which was presented at the Carousel de Louvre during Paris Men's Fashion Week last week (above).
Recht works from his Reykjavik studio to create garments and accessories from unconventional materials, and his previous collections have included stillborn lamb leather and silk extracted from a spider's gland implanted in a goat.
We posted stories about a wooden t-shirt prototype and carnival costumes made from folded paper last year.
Photography is by Marinó Thorlacius.
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Read on for more information from Sruli Recht:
Story
This is the fifth complete menswear line from Sruli Recht. “This collection is completely burned.” - Sruli Recht, January, 2013. The collection in three words – facetted, charred, smoking.
The Concentrated collection for Autumn and Winter 2013/14 consists of 28 total looks - from heavy coats, fur jackets, tailored suits, cardigans, to trousers, shorts and underwear, pea-coats, shirts, sweaters and jerseys, complimented by boots, loafers, trainers, bags, raincoats, gloves, cufflinks and fossilized resin jewellery - 60 styles, approximately 150 with material variations.
All garments and product samples are produced in-house and in the EU, unless otherwise stated. The majority of the garments/ items are constructed from a single pattern piece and one piece of material, utilising an origami hybrid of tailoring, draping and digital modification.
This season employs a global selection of waxed cottons, leathers, wool and felts, silks, and timber, complimented by Icelandic reindeer and horse skin. A permanent creasing system has been developed for the mechanised pleat structures of the garments. Our buttons this season are in the form of a facetted shield, made from oxidised metal alloy rods, designed, moulded and drop-cast in the studio.
Materials
Featured sourced materials: Japanese denim and heavy satin, goat skin, walnut wood, cashmere rib, metal mesh, Austrian felt, Scottish waxed cotton, viscose jersey, wool and modal jersey, silk and cupro shirting, shearling, pixelated rabbit fur, and Italian wool suiting.
Anthropodermic Leather
In a documented one-time surgery-performance, a plastic surgeon removed a 110mm x 10mm strip of skin from the abdomen of Sruli Recht. The subcutaneous tissue and epidermis was then scraped from the dermis, which is stripped of fat by hand and blade, before being salted, and tanned with an Alum solution. The resulting leather from the dermis was prepared for use in the ring, Forget Me Knot.
Wool Silk Skeins
Complete and unwound skeins made of 30% silk and 70% wool, made in Switzerland, hand applied in an incredibly intricate process on the stand.
Polygonal Wooden Material
To transform wood into a flexible wooden surface, by dark digital art, a cell-phone whispered soft binary code to a walnut tree seed for a year, then planted it in the ashes of a glacier.
Once grown, the wood is deconstructed into geometric pieces, and then attached to a textile base by hand, creating a material half wood, half textile - a flexible wooden surface, completely fragmentary.
The "Wooden Textiles" in this collection are produced with Elisa Strozyk, uniquely for our garments.
Fossilised Resin
Emulating nature's processes of fossilisation and weathering, our jewellery this season is made using resin and raw minerals. Combing black acrylic resin with pyrite specimens, and white resin with bornite specimens (peacock ore), each piece is individually hand sculpted by Jade Mellor.
Eiderdown
Hand collected Eiderdown from the abandoned nests on the beaches of Örlygshofn, in the Westfjörds of Iceland.
The down of birds is a layer of fine feathers found under the tougher exterior feathers.
Very young birds are clad only in down. The loose structure of down feathers traps air, which helps to insulate the bird against heat loss. The word down comes from the Old Norse word dūnn.
The down is cleaned in our studio for use in our show-piece Interdiktor.