Shapeshifters: Boudicca

"Warrior queens fascinate us."

Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby of British label Boudicca endlessly play with silhouette and shape. Boudicca creates feminine designs that demand respect. The label wasn’t named after a combative Celtic queen for nothing.

Sonny Groo interviewed Boudicca for the SHAPE magazine made specially for Arnhem Mode Biennale 2009.

Boudicca always knows how to surprise. Which role does the element of surprise play in your work?
We continuously try to think of ways in which we can affect people’s feelings. We challenge them to think about our work and the way they dress. We search for expression and those things that couture is based on. The means we use to do so can be paper, felt or thread, but it could also be the most expensive of materials.

1. In which manner do you work with volume and basic shapes?
   The silhouette has an eminent history. We are currently in a phase in which we use shape to search for echoes of the past, in order to redefine that past. The availability of this information enables us to work with multiple silhouettes and shapes. We are guided by a tangle of faults that pass through different eras and somewhere in that mix we find the right position, within our own language.

2. In your collections, the focus on volume and form is often directed towards one shoulder. Is this a deliberate decision or has it to do with a feeling you are trying to translate?
   Warrior queens fascinate us. This explains our open view towards uncontrolled, chaotic and broken points in time. It serves as a breeding ground for ideas that slowly take shape by switching between ideas and dreams of the past. Therefore the design is not controlled by symmetry or the necessity of symmetry. It is not the philosophy behind it. Letting go and being able to make mistakes, that is our mainstay.

3. Some of your designs are viewed as sculptures or even art. How do you feel about that?
   Art and sculptures are words that could apply to what we do, but our collections are defined forms of identity, a sort of mask or armoury, and sometimes they are simply just clothes.

Sonny Groo is a stylist and editor-in-chief of Mykromag.

For a photo report of the complex design process of Boudicca's installation for Arnhem Mode Biennale 2009, please click here.