The new normal fashion brands in London are exposing their new material online only. The house of E. Tautz is presenting Lookbook Spring/Summer 2021 in London.
Back in January we began the process of designing our summer collection as normal.
It was researched and designed, studio toiles had been made and some fabric had been woven and printed when the lockdown started.
Work on physical garments had to stop so instead we worked on creating a digital presentation, collaging and photo-compositing a series of images that we hope tells the story of our collection.
Real clothes will follow in due course.
E. Tautz is a ready-to-wear fashion label with a Savile Row aesthetic. Founded in 1867 by Edward Tautz, E.Tautz catered to the sporting and military elite of its time, traditions that inform the collections today. Headed by owner and creative director Patrick Grant, E. Tautz was re-branded in 2009 and launched as a ready to wear label to wide critical acclaim. Awarded BFC/GQ Designer Menswear Fund 2015, E. Tautz provides men with a 'uniform for a life less ordinary', taking the formality out of tailoring.
THINK HAPPY TAUTZ
Lockdown has been an ordeal for so many different reasons so we wanted to offer something uncompromisingly jolly. We thought about happy memories and who knows how but we settled upon scratch and sniff stickers, laden with daft fruity characters and all their simple slogans of positivity. So we’ve made little woven versions of them to sew onto our clothes.
The colours are alive with juiciness and our fruits say ‘THINK HAPPY TAUTZ’. I like the idea of just selling the patches to sew on your existing clothes to give them a little happiness boost.
I’ve been thinking and talking a lot throughout the last four months about recovery and rejuvenation and by chance I watched Cocoon, the mid eighties sci-fi in which a group of elderly Floridians are given a new lease of life by swimming with a mad alien egg.
It has some of the best summer fashions ever worn on film, Don Ameche’s tropical shirts and shuffleboard suits are a joy, everything he wears speaks of a happy life in the sunshine.
And the graphic simplicity of Ameche’s wardrobe called to mind collage work of Romare Bearden (who I was introduced to by the Brilliant Mary Beard).
Bearden’s works, like Odysseus Leaves Nausicaa, offered inspiration for print and applique. It felt right to continue to seek ways to create new and beautiful garments from second-hand textiles, as we did for AW20, and we had planned to applique in the style of Bearden, but instead we created the images which we offer in lieu of a live show using collages of current clothes with previous runway and other found images. T
he backgrounds to these images are photographs of the sadly deserted summer sports fields that I have taken on bike rides around of Pennine Lancashire where I have been living during lockdown, very much Inspired by the brilliant ‘European Fields’ by Hans van der Meer, someone who’s work we referenced in our SS17 collection. We’ve given life to these scenes by collaging in the sporting protagonists, and a spectator wearing Tautz. Some of these spectators have been helping their neighbours with their shopping.
Patrick Grant