These Five Emerging Designers Took Nike Tech Pack and Made It Their Own

For AnOther Magazine A/W18, we invited five of Britain’s most exciting design talents to take existing Nike Tech Pack garments – the innovative, material-focussed line from the brand – and transform them into something new. Here, in their own words, Harry Freegard, Chopova Lowena, Laura Deanna Fanning, Goom Heo and Patrick McDowell reveal the stories behind their creations.

Harry Freegard

Freegard, better known by his Instagram moniker @harrie.bradshaw, is a graduate of the Central Saint Martins BA course. A proponent of the burgeoning LOLwear movement, his graduate collection saw him stage his own funeral – complete with ‘garment bag ghost’, Princess Diana-style memorial crockery and a spraypainted mini-scooter, trailed by Harry’s ‘skeleton’ – soundtracked by a mash-up of Chopin’s Funeral March and The Pet Shop Boys’ Absolutely Fabulous. (“I would absolutely have this played at my funeral – it would be a very Patsy and Edina affair,” he told Another Man.) 

“The Nike Tech Pack pieces I made are extensions of pieces from my graduate collection where I patchworked together gowns, tops and trousers from smelly worn socks – the Nike pieces require far less Febreze. I approached it with my usual instincts of chop and sew: I make a gorgeous textile, drape it gorgeously on a body, and behold! A gorgeous thing is made. However, with this project I didn’t have a fit model and I was going on holiday the following morning so I whipped up the pieces without any idea how they looked on a person; I have a healthy imagination and in my mind’s eye they were just as gorgeous on a model as they were on my kitchen table. The strangest thing I used in a piece? Perhaps chewing gum.” 

Patrick McDowell

McDowell grew up close to Liverpool in Wirral, where he remembers travelling into the city centre in the early 2000s and a sea of football kits, tracksuits and trainers. A sportswear sensibility has remained in the Central Saint Martins graduate’s work, which sees a focus on upcycling; for his graduate collection, for example, he repurposed his father’s rock climbing wear colourful new forms – which found him a fan in M.I.A..

“I chose several samples and mixed them into one jacket. Working with existing garments is different to using a roll of fabric – I made the pattern to fit into what I had. Mostly opening specific seams to make the pieces work for themselves such as track legs as sleeves and reusing existing zippers and finishings. As a sustainable designer it was great to have the chance to reuse existing samples and push myself to design something from existing garments. I usually work with reclaimed fabric so It was wonderful to try something new. I once made a huge shoulder piece out of a box of left over PVA glue in high school – I dried it all into big sheets in the kitchen after mixing dyes and feathers into it. It was crazy!” 

Chopova Lowena

Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena – together, Chopova Lowena – met on the Central Saint Martins MA, where they were first to show a graduate collection as a duo since Marques’Almeida in 2011. Favouring the intricacy of handmade garments, they take much of their inspiration from the centuries-old crafts of Bulgaria, where Chopova was born – their most recent collection clashed the traditional costumes of the country’s winter folk festival, the Surva, with the neon-toned singlets of 1980s wrestlers. Chopova’s first memory of Nike is wearing her brother’s old, baggy sweatshirts. 

“To make the piece we sublimated a collage of prints on top of a Nike Tech Pack T-shirt. We chose the piece at the AnOther office and we knew we wanted to place the whole garment into the heat press and print over the top. Since the T-shirt was already a light pink colour and the fabric very slippery, it nicely distorted the way the print transferred. It is not new to us to work with existing garments. We utilise all sorts of found and collected garments, fabrics and objects into our clothes. The strangest thing is probably a vintage New Year’s celebration towel we found on an eastern European auction site which is now the sleeve of a dress.”  

Goom Heo

Korea-born Goom Heo is currently mid-way through the final year of the Fashion MA at Central Saint Martins, though her exaggerated proportions and extreme layering – shown first at the Central Saint Martins BA show – have already caught attention (Heo placed number 38 on this year’s Dazed 100). One particular fascination is the sometimes strange combination of tailoring and sportswear, which is where her Nike garment began. 

“I wanted to combine sportswear and vintage conventional garments such as tailored jacket and trousers. I find the combination of these two quite interesting, and also I wanted to show the sportswear can also be the look to go to work – not just going to gym or work out. I chose the pieces and I wanted to choose something I’ve never worked with such as women’s bra top or hoodie. It was great to be experimental with pieces from Nike and mixing with conventional garments, like tailored jackets and trousers.” 

Laura Deanna Fanning

Twin sisters Laura and Deanna Fanning, who were born and grew up in Australia, first encountered fashion reading magazines in their grandmother’s garage. Becoming an official duo at Central Saint Martins – Deanna is a knitwear designer, Laura, womenswear – their clothing since caught the eye of Kiko Kostadinov, who asked them to become creative directors of his first womenswear line shown at London Fashion Week in September. To them, Nike represents innovation. 

“What first appealed was the opportunity to make a contoured piece and to see how that interrupts the oversized Nike pieces shown to us. Using our custom knit fabrics in jacquards and double knit, we pieced together a contoured waistband in lively tones to contrast the dark shades of the Nike pieces. We tend to collage and contrast our ideas as a duo, sometimes it helps to start this process by creating a hybrid made from existing garments as a starting point. We could use anything for this, sometimes it may not be clothing but something we like for shape or texture. Here, rather than directly cutting or customising a piece we wanted to look at layering over it.”

Hair: Alfie using Fatboy Hair. Make-up: Celia Burton at JAQ Management. Model: Shujing Zhou at Next Models. Casting: Svea Greichgauer at AM Casting. Photographic assistants: Jack Symes and Banana Lloyd. Styling assistant: Iso Attrill-Newman. Hair assistant: James Bickmore. Make-up assistant: Beth Lewis. Production: Louise Mérat at Artistry London. 

These photographs originally featured in the Autumn/Winter 2018 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale internationally now.