Carlo Brandelli’s scaled gestures cut a fine silhouette

‘It is difficult to show the idea of your work by image alone,’ explains creative polymath Carlo Brandelli from Venice where he is currently working on a new glass sculpture series. ‘My work isn’t just about design or fashion, it also involves artistic theory with a heavy architectural bias, so by making these 1/6 scale gestures I can clearly show a theme or concept.’

Brandelli usually crafts around twenty miniatures a season, which he likes to give to like-minded people that cross his path. Zaha Hadid was fond of hers, so was David Adjaye, while Okwui Enwezor has begun collecting them.

Fusing fashion design, architecture and sculpture, Brandelli says he primarily uses them to ‘test new volumes’. Composed of horsehair – the crucial material that gives all well-tailored jackets a solid foundation – Kilgour's freelance creative director has made the 3, 4 and 5 layered gestures for the past four or five years as a way of explaining the asymmetric and sculptural quality of his designs. 'Negative space, field of perception and scale are easily understood with these,' he explains.

The concept was initially born from his paper pattern making sculptures, inspired by the work of Joseph Beuys, which Brandelli produced back in 2010 during a break from fashion. ‘I began them to help me move to a more sculptural, artistic field and also as I missed the discipline of designing jackets,’ he adds.