London

Aitor Throup in his Seven Sisters studio

Menswear designer/illustrator

Who?
Aitor Throup is an inspired 26-year-old who graduated with an MA in menswear from the Royal College of Art last year and who is pioneering a new technique of designing clothes.

What?
Throup breaks conventional rules of how a shirt or jacket should be constructed. No strict cutting techniques, but instead a complex process which starts with his intricate anatomical sketches of characters wearing the clothes. He then creates mini sculptures in a playdough-like substance (think Morph) before fashioning mini outfits onto them. ‘The pencil dictates and I use sculpture to link the drawing to the garment,’ he says. ‘Through cutting on sculptures there are certain things that happen – every single line has a meaning.’ Feature continues

His graduate collection ‘When Football Hooligans Become Hindu Gods’ is a brilliantly constructed collection featuring military-esque jackets including the white, eight-trunked elephant God jacket (pictured) in which the head is constructed into a hood. For the MAN show at London Fashion Week he’s designed a small tailoring line which he will present in the form of an installation.

Where?
Born in Argentina and brought up in Burnley, Throup started his working life in a pizza factory. ‘I was never interested in doing fashion,’ he says. ‘It was all an accident.’ Throup decided he wanted to be a designer after a summer working in a restaurant in Mallorca; as the season drew to an end he found himself drawing characters clothed in utilitarian jackets – the kind of clothes he was fantasising about wearing when he got back home. ‘I got back and thought: I want to be a fashion designer. My mum was horrified.’ He now lives and works from a studio in Seven Sisters.

London loves
‘The Hunterian Museum at the Royal college of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with its old surgical instruments.’

London loathes
‘All the grumpy faces.’

Five words to describe what you do
‘Anatomical, conceptual, functional, intricate, character-based.’

A selection of Aitor’s graduate collection is available from The Library, 268 Brompton Rd, SW3 (020 7584 7292/www.aitorthroup.com) Knightsbridge tube. Open Mon, Tue, Thur-Sat 10am-6.30pm; Wed 10am-7pm; Sun 12.30-5.30pm.