Bradley Sharpe

I recently graduated from Central Saint Martin’s class of 2020 studying Womenswear. Based in London, I’m now working towards launching my own brand, which is an accumulation of tipsy, sculptural womenswear drawn through storytelling. I’ve recently been challenging my responsibility of practising as a sustainable designer. For my graduate collection, I collected tent poles from festival-goers around London and manipulated them into volumes that mocked 18th-century gowns.

Working with Marc definitely taught me how to better communicate a narrative. Something I’ve always admired about Marc’s work is his tangible interest in storytelling and taking his audience to a place in time or thought. Though it seems I only spent a short amount of time there, I learnt so much skill and knowledge from his team, who were so open to lending me their responsibilities to learn.
Being a young creative, one of the most difficult things for me sometimes is staying organised. My parents always taught me that ‘a tidy room is a tidy mind’; working for a big company like Marc Jacobs really gets you in the mood of this. There are so many people, which means so many voices and opinions. If you keep your desk clean and tidy, it sort of tricks you into just taking the day as it comes and being open to new ideas and responsibilities.

Pretty much all of my research comes from my own experiences or things I have naturally seen. A year ago, when my collection was still in its development stage, I had been looking at 18th-century mantuas and sack-back gowns. I decided to walk to school one day and passed by a charity shop with a tent in the window. It just all made sense to me. I had been thinking of new ways to work towards creating these period gowns, and suddenly, it was staring right back at me. There and then, I decided that I was going to challenge tent technologies and materials to adapt to the silhouette of the 18th century.
Throughout my time at CSM, I had always struggled with how to accept my thought process and would think that all the puzzle pieces in my projects had to match. It wasn’t until final year that I embraced the fact that my ideas didn’t perfectly correlate or make total sense.

As a designer, I’d say my responsibility is to showcase my view and opinion to my audience. To directly inspire a Marie Antoinette gown with its excess in frills would declare nothing new to my approach. The point of my collection was to compare 18th-century courting rituals to the rituals I experienced whilst working at a sex club in London. You don’t see any frills, beautiful embroidery or cloth in a dark sex basement in Soho, London; you just see silhouettes.

I remember going to my first festival when I was 17 and being in total disbelief amongst the sea of tents. The sort of thinly shielded privacy that’s enough to keep you dry but not enough to drown your secrets and confessions. I remember walking home after a set, I had drifted away from my friends with a phone with no battery. I was literally just relying on everybody else’s phones that I could see lighting up through their tents casting shadows onto the nylon walls.
Everything in the 1700s was so planned out. Your parents probably would have had a plan for your future and you would have naturally felt obligated to stick to it. The courting events were essentially showrooms for the men in powdered wigs seeking a lover with a heavy bustle. Festivals are like a camp for a huge number of people who perhaps have a few things in common – music, camping/tents, and cool boxes packed with decanted vodka in sprite bottles, just to name a few. And I’ve heard of so many people who have met the love of their life there. And I’m sure there are some that would go to a festival seeking a lover – whether that be for a night or the rest of their lives.

In the 1700s, you still had gossip magazines, and it wasn’t a secret that there were one-night stands in your village or at least short-lived romances. People have and always will just love to gossip. I’d say that gossip is probably one of the only things left from the court that exists in nightclubs today. That, and probably the horrific pick-up lines most men would use to fornicate their wannabe betrothed.

I would love going to Angels or The National Costume Hire to try on all of their period gowns. I think it’s so important to go and see the things you are researching if you can. There were so many things I discovered through doing this, especially pattern cutting techniques and the tiny details you wouldn’t pick up on an image you’d find.
I also remember a couple of years ago, I was modelling for Alister Mackie’s The Leopard magazine wearing a custom Dilara Findikoglu gown. Brett Lloyd was taking the photographs, and the sound of the 18th century was playing through a Sonos speaker. It was magical and something absolutely clicked inside of me wearing that gown, making me just want to perform to the camera and embody what the dress was.

Having seen the varied reactions to my collection, especially those opinions of our beloved Karen’s of Facebook, it’s clear that some people find this to be shocking or ironic. I’d say the use of a tent in place of a traditional mantua is camp, but the technical aspects to the dress and the process of pitching the dress before you wear it is camp-er.

Pink Narcissus, in a nutshell, is a tale of a young man who lures men off the street into his apartment and dresses them up to act out his fantasies. The film explained a lot to me about cruising culture and this idea of going into a space where nobody knows who you are, to act out a version of you nobody would expect. Not to disclose anything too confidential, but a lot of the individuals who would come into the club would be the sweetest-looking on entry but you would witness them getting up to all sorts of debauchery up until the second the club closed. Pink Narcissus was the closest visual reference I could find that tastefully depicts my experience of working/being a fly on the wall at the sex club in Soho to my tutors.

I’ve always wanted to build characters as part of my work and let the clothes be a product of that. One of my goals as a practising sustainable designer is to make clothes that last, and a way of doing that is to make collections that force people to feel something when they wear the garment, or to behave or walk in a certain way. It’s always so interesting to see how people behave and perform when they wear my collection. It’s almost like an armour, you suddenly see the funnier side of life or you just feel like a fucking queen.

I’m pushing my graduate collection further, and that’s all you need to know.