Bianca Saunders (Q3886)
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Bianca Saunders is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Bianca Saunders |
Bianca Saunders is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
The eminent late New Orleans–born photojournalist Bradley Smith wrote forWomen’s Wear Dailyand took photographs forVogueduring the 1940s before encountering what would become the subject of his first book (of many).Escape to the West Indies: A Guidebook to the Islands of the Caribbeanwas first published in 1951 and enjoyed multiple reprints. Besides Smith’s written recommendations designed for well-heeled American tourists, it also contained his photographs of these tourists doing 1940s tourist things; my favorite is of a group downing highballs while driving golf balls into the ocean. Smith also produced a wonderfully sharp and characterful portfolio of portraits showing both staff and guests at an unnamed luxury Jamaican resort posing in front of a bamboo screen.Londoner Bianca Saunders has been traveling back and forth to Jamaica since childhood to visit family and plans to return once more later this year. “It’s been a while since I visited,” she said after her show this morning, “but we’re doing a lot of different projects out there.” In addition to being influenced by Smith’s portraits, her collection was informed by her own snapshot experience.Saunders’s eye for menswear is simultaneously sensual and sisterly. Here she used it to look through Smith’s historical lens as well as her personal one, blending sartorial and workwear details with her more contemporary impressions. Cummerbunds came layered over silk sportswear while full three-quarter culottes in silk or striped cotton were worn above the new calf-topping leather boots that are part of her first steps into footwear and which, she said, reflected Yardie culture.Tracksuits in midnight blue sequins and track pants in a night-sky print played against her trademark undulating shirting and twisted-seam jeans. Exhortations, both domestic and God-fearing, provided T-shirt prints. Considering both the process behind this collection and her own upcoming return to Jamaica, she said: “I guess it never really does change. But at the same time, I was like: Oh, am I going to feel like a tourist?”
19 June 2024
Joining the ranks of designers embracing a digital-first approach this season is Bianca Saunders, the recipient of the new-establishment menswear award at the 2023 Fashion Awards. Transitioning to showcasing her collections on the Paris schedule since the beginning of 2022, the British-Jamaican designer has honed in on refining her core silhouettes for fall. “This collection captures everything I want to say with my brand right now,” she said in a preview. “And I wanted to show some of the looks on women, as well, because everyone should be able to wear and feel comfortable in my clothes.”Taking inspiration from Richard Avedon and James Baldwin’s 1964 book,Nothing Personal, which scrutinized the contradictions within American identity, the collection delved into the intricacies of both the inner and outer selves. While maintaining her signature cuts throughout the lineup, Saunders infused each piece with clever twists, describing them as simultaneously “awkward and sexy.” For example, her denim sets underwent a textural transformation, crafted in striking red vinyl and soft lapis cotton wool. Retaining the twisted-seam pants and matching wide-shoulder cropped jacket, she introduced brand tags and curved the jacket’s collar, enveloping the neck up to the ears when popped—mimicking the silhouette of a ’60s cocoon coat.Elsewhere, collars remained a focal point of exploration throughout. Showcased on both male and female models, a bronze shirt crafted from a blend of cotton and polyester was tailored with darts at the back and on the shoulder seams; it boasted an exaggerated collar and was complemented by matching Lurex long johns. Another highlight was a white cotton poplin shirt with concealed buttons, adorned with meticulously pleated details across the front—referencing a portrait of Avedon sporting a creased shirt tucked into his pants. A silk vichy taffeta shirt in gingham offered voluminous proportions and a permanently popped-up collar. The season’s coats, crafted from water-repellent nylon, had detachable handkerchief-collar details.It’s worth noting this season that the designer placed emphasis on utilizing deadstock fabrics, procured from the LVMH-supported platform Nona Source, in addition to materials from Positive Materials and Isko. Despite opting for a digital presentation, Saunders’s distinctive tailoring, subtle minimalism, and graceful drapery shone through, underscoring movement as a central focus.
29 February 2024
Heading down the Seine after this Bianca Saunders presentation, I felt inspired to fire up “Upsetter Dub 14 Blackboard Jungle” on the headphones and enjoy a comprehensive sonic mind floss. Lee “Scratch” Perry, who sadly passed in 2021, was easily amongst the greatest musicians of the 20th century; his work was central to the development of both reggae and dub (not to mention drum ’n’ bass, jungle, and more). And as Bianca Saunders discovered when she visited an exhibition in London earlier this year, Perry was also an accomplished visual artist. As with his music, he mixed forms and bent materials in order to create new landscapes.After consulting with the Perry estate in Switzerland, Saunders chose motifs from his Ark archive and then set about incorporating them into her clothing design. She approached this with a spirit not too dissimilar to that of Perry, adding apparently found materials like tape and strapping to change the architecture of her garments. There were also some graphic references.She continued her collaboration with Farah, a brand with a fascinating and ever-shifting history in the pantheon of workwear. She also focused on soft hopsack fabrications instead of the company’s famous rigid cottons and used topstitching to expose the functional anatomy of the pieces. There was also a new iteration of her shoe designs with At Kollektive, featuring gently rounded chisel-toed boots with folded uppers, nicely playing against the tape detailing above. The innovative and interrogative use of draping to undo symmetry and create unconventionality remained present and correct. It was particularly effective in a blue check shirtdress that was wrapped around the body and tendriled through the strapping on an indigo denim shirt.
21 June 2023
Bianca Saunders fielded a rarely experienced juxtaposition at her show in Paris: her serious ability to design minimalist-modern clothes against a presentation with an affectionately funny context. One way or another, she’s always pointed toward her Jamaican family background in her London shows. This time, she brought it out for all to enjoy, with a turquoise-painted set that included a corner bar and audio clips taken from the long-running TV show career of Jamaica’s national treasure, the comedian and playwright Oliver Samuels.“This collection is close to my heart!” she later wrote on her Instagram page. “Being able to share stories around my Jamaican culture in an artistic context is an honor.” She thanked Samuels for his permission to use material from his vintageBlouse and Skirtseries, a live-TV comedy with guests that, as far as the audience could hear, involved snatches from some absurd conversational scenarios about modeling and a fashion show.The runway photos tell the other story about how far the British-born Royal College of Art alum has developed her investigation into cutting out a new and elevated way of dressing for her peers. On a broader spectrum, she is one of the generation pushing a new kind of elegance in tailoring and how it can segue through, across genders, into everyday wear—something that’s beginning to reach critical mass as a subject in this latest cycle of shows.The Bianca Saunders method begins with constructing pieces that contain the vestiges of formality—tailored suit jackets and tuxedo coats with draped fronts—but are actually ingeniously made without fastenings, to be pulled on, over the head, as easily as a sweatshirt.Her aesthetic leans toward simplifying, while upgrading and endorsing real ways of dressing. So for example, the look of a white T-shirt gains presence as a cap-sleeve satin tunic, worn over easy putty-colored leather trousers and accessorized with her detail-free matching square-toe slip-on shoes. To finish the total look, there’s her highly desirable minimalist-practical bag: a usefully sized top-handle design that’s concealed in a featureless rectangular wrap of leather.Getting down an original and desirable look for bags and shoes, relevant for anyone across genders, is a commercial achievement that could asterisk Saunders’s talent for any luxury-goods company. In developing it, she’s already collaborating with and being facilitated by Ecco leather.
The refinement of the eye for such things takes time and a persnickety kind of perfectionism.There was more. As the show went on, Saunders showed what she’s able to achieve in coordinated chunky rib knit, exaggerating and elevating the template of the sweat suit to the potential echelon of high fashion. Same goes for her conceptually printed, geometrically glitchy pajama sets. It’s all relatable and quite obviously redolent of a talent that surely belongs to the future of fashion.
18 January 2023
Fluid tailoring, soft minimalism, drapey elegance—whatever it is that we’re seeing emerging as this summer’s menswear consensus, Bianca Saunders has tuned right into it. What’s interesting about her is that she’s been going this way, with her youthful sophistication for some seasons. Her very particular talent is for tweaking, recutting, and draping shapes which once had a generic template (a business suit, a tracksuit, jeans, pajamas) until all the oldness and ordinariness is wiped clean away and replaced with her relaxed, but never sloppy, sense of dressing smartly.Saunders is British-Jamaican, showing in Paris for the second time thanks to the fact that she won the Andam Prize last year (a condition that comes with the French award, although she still lives and works in London). She said she’d based part of her aesthetic on a metaphor about Hard Food, a staple of Jamaican cookery. “It’s starchy foods like yams, bananas, and plantains which start off completely hard, and then become soft when they’re boiled down. So I used that as a concept: the contrasts of textures that are hard in some places and soft in others.”What appears to be simple at a distance, or from front-on, often turns out to be different, or has an unexpected detail in profile, or in the back. A matter of curved, twisted seams to add volume to jeans, a pinched drape on one side of a satin pajama suit, or the buttonless form of a tailored jacket which is actually what she calls “a pullover.”It’s a point of pride that it’s taken her time to work out these pattern points, and that she’s evolving them season by season. An example is the signature set-in shoulder line which began as a boxy, padded silhouette in her spring ’21 collection. This time it re-manifested, reduced and unpadded, in the jacket of a luxurious white suit with raw-edged sleeves and pocket details. Luxurious indeed: she said she’d bought the fabric from LVMH’s deadstock platform Nona (on which it resells leftovers from its haute couture brands).The model wearing it was also carrying an orange version of a clutch bag from Saunders’s new collaboration with Ecco leather; part of a collective design project for the company, alongside Natacha Ramsay-Levi and others. The effect? Well, it was chic.
22 June 2022
“I can’t believe I’m doing my first runway show—and it’s in Paris! It’s a milestone for me!” Bianca Saunders, the British holder of the Andam Prize, took her London crew to the Palais de Tokyo to introduce the evolution of her slick, modern-minimalist menswear to an international audience this morning.According to Paris COVID regulations, she was permitted an audience of only 60, masked and seated a meter apart, but no matter. After four seasons of showing on video, she was raring for the opportunity to present her clothes in the round. A coherently fresh but polished level of maturity emerged—a smartly pulled-together aesthetic, smoothly bridging tailoring, sportswear, denim, and body-wear. “I’m exploring how to contour shape around the male body; exaggerating certain parts of the body through illusion. My clothes reveal themselves when they move,” is the way she put it. “It’s not about one type of man—it’s about different ages feeling confident, elegant, and attractive. Feeling attractive is a big point for me. Comfort, and feeling at home.”The ability to show IRL matters to Saunders, because the essence of her work ever since she was a Masters student at the Royal College of Art is considering men’s physicality in 3-D, with the extra dimension of researching how they feel in clothes. She’s developed a knack for making sophisticated cuts with a high design quotient look easy to wear—nothing too much, but impactful. Her first look said that: It was essentially a relaxed matching jersey overshirt and trackpant, but with a graphic play on a black and white menswear check spun to look “like fabric stretched around the body.”She spent the last two years in and out of lockdown concentrating on developing technical nuances of cut—set-in sleeve-heads that give a jacket a look of a gilet from the back, trousers with inseams that twist to the front, subtle asymmetric slants on the position of flies. Figuring out how to make tailoring relevant to men in a casualized world, she honed overcoats, leather jackets, a beige suit, and a tuxedo as “pullovers,” invisibly fastened with press-studs.It pulled off a picture of a Bianca Saunders wardrobe, clean and clear, and with ambition to cover a range of categories, right down to the molded, chisel-toe shoes. In black, white, or electric blue—part dress-shoe, but with the comfort of trainers—they finished the look while offering a new direction for men who are looking for a way forward from living in boring generics.
Which is the promise of Bianca Saunders’s brand in a nutshell.
19 January 2022
Bianca Saunders is raring to go and radiating positivity. No wonder. Her skilled and nuanced angle on modern masculinity has been bringing her a deluge of international awards and recognition over the past year. She took home the 2021 Andam prize, was a finalist for the LVMH Prize, and was chosen by Alessandro Michele to be one of the young designers whose collections are selling on Gucci Vault. Throughout it all, she’s been working in the studio space awarded to emerging designers at the Sarabande Foundation in London. “I feel like that’s actually what’s been so completely life-changing,” she smiled, over Zoom.This is Saunders’s largest collection yet—30 looks subtly inspired by family photos taken by her mother, at age 18, in Jamaica. Saunders zeroed in on the “in-between tailored and casual” style of her uncles in their polo shirts and Sta-Prest trousers to inform her evolving interest in cut, how men wear clothes, and how fabric sits on bodies. “A lot of my work is observational,” she said.Saudners doesn’t quite have the terminology for the way she eases and pares fabric, rolls shoulder lines forward, twists trouser seams, and likes to conceal fastenings. This season, she created a curved, rounded sleeve inspired by “muscle men” and figured out how to give easy-to-wear jersey pieces the illusion of smartness (a collab with Farah). She also took her invisible-fastening concept a step further by turning tailored jackets into lightweight “pullovers.”The difficulty is that her garment subtleties don’t necessarily show in photographs. But the quality of her clothes certainly does impress hard-to-impress people in real life, as proven in front of the judging committee of the Andam Prize. (Put it this way: Phoebe Philo was on the panel that elected her.) Saunders has a convincingly authentic grip on exactly who she’s aiming to dress: “I actually visualize or imagine this guy walking along the road. I really want people to see themselves in my clothes. Any type of like masculine guy. I guess the main point of my brand is just making people feel good, and making them feel elegant,” she shrugs, half-laughing. “You know, like a luxury man.”There’s a reason that Saunders is releasing her digital lookbook now, during Paris Fashion Week. It’s because this collection is just the precursor, the build-up to the one she’ll be showing in January’s during the men’s show. It will definitely be on the runway (or in another IRL presentation form, TBC), anyway.
Saunders did really well, worked incredibly hard, and truly found herself as a designer during pandemic isolation. Now, she can’t wait to get out of the digital bind, and grab the opportunity to show the world who she is.
1 October 2021
Bianca Saunders managed to go to a Man Ray exhibition in Paris last September—lucky thing! Also a show of Erwin Wurm photographs—lucky thing! “It was a massive refresh,” she remembers, fuel for the burst of creativity she channeled into her new, surrealism-inspired collection back in her studio at the Sarabande Foundation in London.Actually, in those days before travel between London and Paris effectively became illegal for most purposes, Saunders had been there to exhibit her own artworks—suspended wired sculptures of clothes without men in them—at Drawing a Blank, a joint multidisciplinary event for young artists. Its curator, Ben Broome, has described it as something “between a rave and an art show.”That short spell of freedom energized Saunders to progress more experimentally with ideas spun out of surrealism, reapplied to the textiles and tailored structures she’s meticulously built as her brand’s templates. The inspiration behind the short film, made with Daniel Sannwald, is Jean Cocteau’s 1930 movie,The Blood of a Poet.The origin of Saunders’s research has always been her interest in analyzing how clothes behave on men’s bodies as they move, sit, and slouch. Her pattern cutting subtly incorporates her observations of creases, twists and turns of seams, and suchlike. Questioning the conventions of generic garments releases her to think about, say, making a bomber jacket A-line or recasting the idea of a ruffle-fronted dinner shirt into a really chic rippled technique. She furthered the trompe l’oeil “gilet” shoulder of her jackets too. She’s been steadily drawing a cult following for this, even in the midst of the pandemic. Who’s responding? “I’m really going for the smarter guy who’s maybe an artist, who thinks in a bit more detail about clothes,” she says. “What’s been really amazing is that the customers I set out to get, are the ones that I am getting. The ones who sit between masculinity and being quite open.”This time, she taught herself to make prints of creased fabric and superimpose them on a suit and knitwear. Spending time more or less alone and having to DIY processes that might in the usual rush of business be passed out to specialists gave her the chance to concentrate on tweaking shapes and reusing textile scraps. In fact, she’s pretty happy with the way things have gone for her over the past year—she’s had a lot of attention, was invited to be part of GucciFest, and her things are selling.
Enough’s enough, though, she sighs, with an eye roll: “I can’t wait for us all to get out of lockdown, and for people to be able to wear smarter clothes again.” And so say all of us.
21 February 2021
“It was one of the best Zooms I’ve been on all year!” says Bianca Saunders, remembering Alessandro Michele’s briefing to 15 young designers on making their films for GucciFest. “It was really a thrill to be selected for a project like this.” Michele pretty much encouraged everyone to go crazy with their ideas—the only parameters being that the films shouldn’t be more than 10 minutes, and that they should mix in a couple of new things. Saunders thought about it and decided, she says, that “it would be better to challenge myself to do a whole new thing—to show a massive fashion house what a small brand can do. I was in quarantine for two weeks, having just come back from Paris. It was a really quick turnaround, but I managed to use that time to design it, order fabrics, and plan the film. I think I even impressed myself a little bit in how just how much I can achieve in a short space of time.”What she came up with is “The Pedestrian,” a cutely revealing film about men made with her friend Akinola Davies Jr., inspired by a sequence in Spike Lee’sShe’s Gotta Have It, “where a bunch of men are talking about a female character and describing how they’re going to approach her. A lot of my work is about subverting that sort of thing, and turning it the other way around. So it’s the woman asking the questions.” Her models are asked to describe themselves, their idea of an ideal date, and their pick-up lines. “There’s an element of wit in it, to make people smile and see a bit more fun within fashion.”A couple of her subjects’ ideal dates include “watching an anime film” and “going for a nice meal and then to laser tag.” One boy’s pickup line goes “Are you an astronaut? Because you’re out of this world.” Two of them go for “Are you from Tennessee? Because you’re the only 10 I see,” though the youngest one confesses, “but now I’m older, I know that’s absolutely terrible.”Saunders is always on the side of the men she knows. Delicately and affectionately getting them to reveal their usually unspoken feelings has been the framework of her research since her menswear graduation project at the Royal College of Art, when she had the brilliantly insightful idea of interviewing some male friends in their bedrooms to find out what really makes them choose the clothes they wear.The upshot of her unexpected Gucci commission is that Saunders was able to develop a 12-look continuation of her last collection.
She circled back to refine her distinctive boxy tailored shirts, the inset pleated shoulder lines, minimal trenchcoat shapes, and forward-angled trouser cuts. “So it’s my first pre-fall collection! Part two of what I did for spring.” As for all of the GucciFest young designers, it enabled her to gain more experience in today’s essentially important domain of fashion film-making, to have it springboarded onto an internationally-viewed platform, and to get ready with something more to sell in the bargain. “I would never have been able to afford to do all that without this opportunity,” she smiles. “I’m really grateful to them.”
19 November 2020
Bianca Saunders’s progress as a young menswear designer is proof of the subtleties and nuances she harnesses as a rising star in the constellation of Black British creative talent in London. This season—with the benefit of lockdown time to refine her meticulous aims—she presented The Ideal Man, a collection which emerged from a convergence of her research on a ’70s art photography series by Hans Eijkelboom and her take on Ballroom categories.“I found this work Eijkelboom had done, where he interviewed women about what they considered their ideal man to be, then dressed himself up as that, and photographed himself with them.” As a woman designer whose work lies in training her gaze—and her curiosity—onto men, that idea resonated. “I always want to be empathetic,” she said. “Part of my design process is almost like listening to people.” Listening, that is, and also observing how clothes move, and how guys habitually wear things in their off-guard moments. That’s how she began her technique of crinkled shirting, now a signature, as well as the ruching that she’s applied to the shorts of a pajama-striped cotton “suit” for next summer.This season, she had weeks to push structured cuts we haven’t seen from her before. “What I really liked was that I could take a lot of time to perfect and drape on the mannequin at home.” She came up with a raised padded shoulder line for shirts and boxy suit jackets, and abstracted a raincoat down to a coolly minimal shape with rectangles for storm-flaps, and concealed buttons.There’s a level of youthful but professionally thought-out design here that has already caught the attention of Bruce Pask of Bergdorf Goodman. Her opinion is increasingly sought out—she is on theForbes30 under 30 list—and she’s regularly approached for collaborations; this season with Wrangler.Saunders is also part of the Black friendship group of interdisciplinary talents who back each other up as creative teams in London. This year, there’s a sense of breakthrough on that front. “I feel it’s definitely leveled up,” she says. On her side is Saul Nash, the independent menswear designer; he helped put together the socially-distanced Ballroom performance together with the legendary creative consultant Karen Binns. The video, shot by Daniel Sannwald, has scenes running from “Gangster Pretending to Be Corporate” to “Gully Queen at his Engagement Party.” Really fun, but with clothes you could see guys wearing.
Because that’s the prize Bianca Saunders has her eyes set on.
2 October 2020
When there’s a group of guys dancing at 9:30 in the morning on a Sunday in the east end of London, and people are standing about nodding their heads at them, you’d usually be correct in assuming they’d all been there since the night before. But no: This was Bianca Saunders, rising to the challenge of an ungodly early slot for her presentation, and then clearly smashing it on the audience-approval meter. The guys were actually separated from one another in a line of satin-draped booths, with the audience milling around, united in one contagious outbreak of smiles.It’s too bad that you can’t see their moves in these stills, but Saunders’s Instagram captures the boys—unselfconscious dancers, all—activating the merits of her cleanly-designed redefinitions of tailoring and streetwear in their booths.“I was watching this early ’90s video shot in a Jamaican dance hall in Kingston,” Saunders said, standing beside a wall projection on the way in. “I’m a Londoner and Jamaica is my background. And for a long time, I threw house parties, growing up.” The idea for her presentation setup, simple but effective, was “that people would dance, like they would normally do in a club, in the dark, when no one’s watching.” Casting the show in her studio, she said, “We put on music and asked them to dance. I street-cast some of them and others are agency models. It was really fun. I should’ve recorded it,” she laughed. “It was like a dance competition.”Intellectually, what interests Saunders is how clothes move; that and really understanding what guys her age think about how they relate to them. In the booths, they put her “new three-piece suits” and elevated takes on tracksuits to the test. Saunders looks like what she designs—she has a youthful modern elegance which comes from her generation’s veneration of the cool, clean ’90s (Helmut Lang and all that, though she was barely born). That’s what motivates her slick and functional cutting, and how she came up with the matched reconfigurations of three-piece suits—long vests extending beneath regular jackets, with sheer or body-hugging T-shirts. What you can’t see—it’s a pity—is the swagger these have in movement, whether walking or dancing. Her other idea for a three-piece: a matching dark denim combination of long vest, shirt, and trousers.
6 January 2020