At the time of filming, Marios Antoniou was an MA Fashion student at London College of Fashion. His encounter in the archive was arranged by Course Director Darren Cabon to support the development of his menswear collection, for which he applied a design methodology informed by the study of images of Victorian and Edwardian clowns.

Amongst the costumes viewed was the patched, distressed clown costume worn by Maurice of Maurice & May, a comedy cycling clown act, and which was made out of deconstructed suits. It is, in Darren Cabon’s words, “the patching together of garments that appear to be made, then cut apart, and then reassembled as something else”. He draws comparisons with the designs of Comme des Garçons in whose “all wool, tailored collection in the early 90s, the garments were cut and frayed and then put together without any pressing. You got this very same effect with Maurice’s costume”.

Marios Antoniou’s catwalk show, captured in Alex Maguire’s photograph, revives the ghosts of Edwardian clowns and places the archived costume in between past, spent performances and future fashion collections. Darren Cabon comments on the different types of hand stitching and mending in the garments found in the archive as evidence of costume being made and remade by more than one pair of hands, and the human quality this entails.

These garments testify to many performances through their wear and tear, through the work in their making, their breaking and their mending and re-mending. Marios Antoniou’s photographs are of the damage inflicted on his own beautifully tailored collection after a year of catwalk and editorial work. These images reflect on the fragments left from the spectacle of a show in the common ground between the performer’s work and that of the fashion designer.

1. Photograph by Alex Maguire.

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