LONDON — Four months after announcing his return to fashion, Aitor Throup is ready to open up about his 20-year quest for a new kind of luxury, which will be set out in full at “Ultra Veil,” an immersive exhibition running from Oct. 30 to Nov. 8 at the Ambika P3 in London.
Presented with the Westminster Menswear Archive, led by men’s expert Andrew Groves, and Fred Perry, the show will be the Argentine-born, U.K.-raised designer’s first new body of work in a decade. It will feature more than 100 sculptural prototypes and drawings, laying the conceptual groundwork for Throup’s ready-to-wear rollout next year under his new venture, Aitor Ultra.
The Stone Island, C.P. Company and G-Star collaborator said he is using the underground space opposite Baker Street Station to introduce what he calls a “definitive design system,” billed as the operating software for the Aitor Ultra brand.
“It’s also a synthesis of my journey over the last 20 years into a singular vision, essentially a self-enclosed design system,” added Throup, who last showed in London a decade ago.
“To be able to convey the meaning of my work is so important. I don’t just want things to be implied or suggested. I have to really understand what my work is about, and I think that’s why I take so long to create or to release new work,” he added.
The show will be arranged in spatial layouts, with prototypes and drawings realized in variations of a translucent, veil-like mesh, which Throup has long used as a metaphor for identity and concealment. He said the pieces are treated to become ghostly three-dimensional veils: part garment, part sculpture, part relic of process.
“I want to essentially force an emotional reaction from everybody that walks in,” he said.
Sketches of Aitor Ultra development.
Courtesy
Visitors won’t find traditional runway looks, as the designer is deliberately resisting the standard format, for now at least.
“I have fought the temptation to put full looks together,” he said. “For me, it’s more about the object, being a symbol of the process. You’ll see an archetypal garment, like for a hoodie, and you’ll see an early version, a later version and the final-ish version.”
Showing the development process will be crucial to how his new fashion venture operates. In his mind, it will be a “philosophy, concept and process-centric brand” that rejects being product-led.
“The product comes simply as a symptom of the why and the how,” he said.
That thinking is reflected in a tiered model. At the top sit the one-off sculptural pieces, positioned as Tier Art. Below that is Tier Zero, limited-edition, factory-made iterations of his archetypes, released via drops rather than wholesale. Then there is Tier One, representing the broader ready-to-wear line, to be shown to buyers next January in Paris ahead of a wider June release.
“I love the idea of redefining luxury by allowing these highly curated sculptural prototypes to be consumed. Imagine if you could have bought the original blueprint of the Burberry trenchcoat. The early prototypes before it becomes an archetype within the brand,” he said. “It’s crazy to me that you’ll be able to buy the original prototypes as artworks. It’s like a kind of origin story.”
Poster for Aitor Throup’s Ultra Veil exhibition.
Courtesy
The exhibition also serves as a diagnosis and an escape route for his 20-year struggle with mental health, which has led to pauses in his fashion output and later pivoting to projects like Anatomyland, his NFT-based sculptural venture.
“I’m taking the viewer into what I believe is my human experience. First, as a young, non-white immigrant in England, there was a sense of oppression and racism. In my work, that was reflected through a sense of neurological oppression by my left brain over my right brain,” he said.
“It culminates in the end through very symbolic sculptural installations that really symbolize the death of the oppression and the death of the left brain. I’m deadly serious that my mental health has massively suffered through this really overactive, perfectionist-focused logic of my left brain, and I’ve had to create this thing that’s taken me 20 years to figure out a way out of it, to create freely,” Throup added.
Ultimately, Ultra Veil is his attempt to redefine a new luxury for himself and, potentially, for an audience fatigued by surface-level luxury, and propose a different kind of brand-consumer relationship.
“I am trying to redefine a new luxury by prioritizing the philosophy, the concept and the process behind the product, fiercely protecting that over everything. I care about the product so much that it’s imperative for me to bring people into the story behind the product,” Throup said.
“A good action movie won’t lead with the action. It must tell you the backstory of the protagonist before the action happens,” he added.
