Thereness, the collection of Portuguese designer Renato Bras for his MA at Central Saint Martins, is a state of being caught on the salty wind of Nazaré, 125 kilometers from Lisbon at the center of Portugal’s coastline. It’s where the yellow-green tails of deadstock jersey dance on wet sand - where the sun-bleached colors of skirts and shirting aren’t the melancholy of a cloudy day, but memories of a long summer spent with family and friends, hot and windy nights taking off the layers of the day while journeying from place to place on the coast.
“It’s a family of garments that I knew I needed to make no matter what the collection was going to be,” says Renato of Thereness, a reflection of one moment in time to be owned by the wearer to infinitely rework and re-wear.
The designer’s BA collection was a sculptural meditation on family memory and Portuguese craft, less for the everyday and more like a museum catalogue of growing up. “If you see a silk dress you don’t want to touch it with beachy hands, it’s not for you or not for that moment. You put it in a box and wear it once a year.” This was the opposite, he says, “it was taking away all that fuss.”
A concept piece looks like a beach towel has been blown onto the body serendipitously while coming out of the ocean; a striped shirt is sewn into a navy polo thrown over a wrap skirt and bikini; an impractically perfect hoodie made of wool produced by the ChiCoração factory protects exposed shoulders in a ruched see-through cotton and calico dress; “It’s the T-shirt that you never really iron because it’s just broken,” the designer says, “It was what I’d do and what my parents would do every day.”
The collection pays homage to passed down traditions of dressing for the beach in Portugal, but also the country’s rich visual culture and textile production. This time, the work began in Nazaré. “It’s a place that me and my mom go specifically, where we go to just feel something. The waves, it just feels very different and intense but very peaceful as the same time, cleansing. There’s always a mist in the air, and it’s thick with water.” Behind the delicate craftsmanship of each garment, Renato has woven in a wearability which allows the collection to transform from day to night, hot to cold, breezy to hot summer air. They are “the fabrics that you’d wear to the beach like that gross shirt that you had when you were 15, the jeans that you don’t really wear out because they’re not cool enough, your dad’s navy polo,” and pieces of driftwood tied with rope on the feet to protect against hot pavement after the sea swallowed your sandals.
The cross motif throughout whispers the collection’s transcendence of traditional craft and the subversion of how materials are used aesthetically and structurally. Many of the garments are pattered entirely with interlocking crosses or edges of crosses which, when draped, both hide and reveal this underlying continuity. Renato contrasts hand knitted yellow pockets on a sheer skirt with the unconventional placement of front pockets on a bomber lined with Portuguese shirting fabric as a way of acknowledging his craft tradition while also subverting it.
Renato imagines a day in a fictional life at the sea, going from car to sand, out to lunch and back in the water, to dinner, drinks and dancing. The clothes are the result of swims taken and wine sipped subconsciously under the warm yellow glow of Lisbon sun, and memories of his grandmother, who passed away last year, bleaching everything a crisp, pure white.
Thereness is about capturing these moments of being in organdy, jersey, cotton and wool. Memories are carefully stitched together to create a feeling of happenstance beauty as if the clothes had never been made, but picked up off the beach after a long day watching waves crash under the yellow sun. While the name of the collection comes from the writing of John Berger, Renato makes clothing like the poet Ruth Stone wrote her works. At the edge of a river, Stone would listen to the wind and the water, waiting for a poem to come to her on the breeze. As it floated by, she would run after it hoping to catch the poem and write it down before it blew away. Renato’ river is the Atlantic ocean at Nazaré. He knew right where to stand to catch this feeling because he had been there a thousand times. “I didn’t have to make anything up, it was all just there.”
- Jacquin Cunningham
Show Notes:
1. For sometimes a sound is more easily grasped as a silence, just as a presence, a visible presence, is sometimes more eloquently conveyed by just a disappearance. (John Berger)
2. Spirit beauty is the supreme perfection. And since the unpractical is never perfect, it is also impossible for it to be beautiful. (p. 24, Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime)
3. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. (p. 56, Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic)
4. A light in which there is no permanence, a light of nothing longer than a glimpse. (p. 4, John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket)
5. To turn away from him welcomes memories in salted breeze, misty childhood archeology. (Jacquin Cunningham, 2024)
6. Such stripped respect for everyday things without elevating them, in some way, without referring to salvation by way of an ideal which the things embody or serve (…) The boots have been worn by walking (…). (p. 88, John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket)
7. The lack of contours around [her] identity allowed [her} to be extraordinarily open, allowed [her] to become permeated by what [she] was looking at. (p. 91, John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket)
End:
Images, words, design, production: Jacquin Cunningham / jacquincunningham.com / @quiningham
Model: Ella Pound / The Hive Management, Unit 17, Tileyard Studios, Tileyard Road, London, United Kingdom / @ella_pound / @thehivemodels
Printed at Central Saint Martins Publications Workshop, London, England. Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London N1C 4AA
March 1st, 2024
1st Edition, 5 copies.
Images © Jacquin Cunningham, 2024.
Produced for RENATO BRAS.