Fashion Studio - Primitive

You know when you spot some waifish, avant-garde catwalk of a human being wandering around London Fashion Week – or stocking up on bargain vodka in Morrisons, if you live anywhere between Shoreditch and Stratford – and can't quite pin down where they picked up their platform sandals and all-black deconstructed man-dress? Chances are they're from Primitive London, a boutique under some railway arches in Haggerston that stocks any new fashion designer worth caring about emerging from London and Tokyo. Primitive founders, Lui Nemeth and Andrew Grune, are launching their own collection soon, which anyone with a basic working knowledge of London's fashion scene are boner-inducingly excited about, so I visited their studio in what they've dubbed the Haggerston triangle – the area of Haggerston that contains their shop, studio and flat – and had Lui explain some of the stuff I saw lying around.          "We had a pop-up store earlier this year in Tokyo and, as decoration, we spray-painted a load of plants black, which everyone seemed to love. So, we took that idea back home and spray-painted these fake plants to have as decoration in our London store. We found some concrete blocks up the road a while ago and started using them to display stuff, so we thought we should cast some concrete pots for these plants to go in. We love concrete at the moment. In fact, we were thinking about making some concrete necklaces, but we haven't really worked out how to do that without either making them really fragile, or creating the heaviest jewellery known to man." "Andrew stole these heads from American Apparel. In fact, a lot of the stuff we have in our store is either found or "found", if you know what I mean. We also bought a massive half-black, half-white, half-asian looking mannequin that we're going to spray with glossy black paint. Those race fractions don't really add up, but whatever, it's going to look cool." "This is from the first exhibition we did at the Primitive store. That grating behind the T-shirt is another thing I found on the street, actually. I don't know what this piece means, I just really like painting fabric, so my sister and I painted this T-shirt to make it look kind of mucky, then stuck it up on the grate." "We were out in Australia, spending some time with Andrew's family, and saw all these kangaroo balls being sold everywhere as little souvenirs. Usually they're a lot nicer than these ones – all blond and soft – but we somehow ended up taking back one of the gnarly pair of balls. We actually made accessories out of them for the Tokyo pop-up store. It's funny, in England everyone's freaked out by them, but everyone in Japan absolutely loved them. We sold so many kangaroo ball pendants out there to teenage boys who thought it was funny to have a pair of balls hanging off their neck." "We made a load of Primitive badges with my mum's badge-making machine, but we couldn't really sell them and we didn't want to just give them away, so we ended up making this jewellery out of them. Those chains that they're stuck on to are actually these amazing dog chains that we found in Portugal." "This is one of the L_A_N zine dresses. Veronica So, who's the editor of L_A_N, was on tour in Japan with her band Teeth, and she whipped up a few exclusive pieces for our pop-up store. The dress has the pages and pictures from the first issue of L_A_N digitally printed all over it, which is amazing. I've never seen anything like that done before." "This is the backpack we made for our new collection. The Primitive logo has ten parts to it, so we've made ten pieces for the collection, and the backpack is piece number two. Our concept was to take certain, sectioned-off shapes from the logo and interpret them into different pieces for the collection. So, for example, the backpack takes two straight lines from the corner of the logo, which is why it's piece number two." "We made this hat for Nadir Tejani's graduation show. It's made out of the inside of a football, which I love, because every inner bit from a football has all these amazing different patterns, and you never know what you're going to get until you open it up." "This is the screen that we use for all our logo T-shirts. We designed the logo by basically playing around with the letter E in Photoshop, but the other day someone was saying that we're a bridge between London and Tokyo, and that, because our shop is under a bridge and our logo kind of looks like a basic architectural sketch of a bridge, or something, that we'd obviously planned it all out with this huge concept, which we hadn't. So yeah, it's kind of high concept by mistake, but it works."

Thanks, Primitive!

Previously: Studio - Dan Szor