Zippers are a strong element of the Graeme Armour Brand and how we use them each season becomes one of our creative challenges. This season we used YKK high quality metallic Excella range zippers in High finish gold and industrial black.

This collection evolved from listening to an old seventies rock band called Free, and a song called “Fire and Water.” We started to look at fire, flames, hells angels, rockers, and then at the sea, where the jellyfish concept began.

Fire, water and heavy metal, our challenge was to take each of these vocal elements and symbolically reconstruct the song through fashion. The collection was built around the positioning of metallic zippers in relation to the other elements. The zipper in this sense was the base line.

Zippers were used as trims to finish the edges of straps and frills. They were also essential to the structure and form of the garments. By applying the metal zippers in certain way enables the user to detach parts of the dresses. These parts of the garment can be opened or closed depending on how racy you are feeling. We call this style the “peek-a-boo effect”. You are able to expose at your leisure. We also combined size 10 and size 5 YKK metal zipper teeth together on top of one another. One is for decoration the other is functional, creating a fresh feel. Zippers circle the body instead of going straight up and down. We also added metallic zippers to the leather as a trim on minx stretch netting (tulle) making it heavier and allowing the zipper to become the main feature. In this way we created a jelly fish feel.Zippers rock as do jelly fish.

Photographs by Nick Dorey.

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