If you're thinking about transforming that half-baked fashion shoot concept you've been mulling over into a billboard-ready spectacle, where each otherworldly outfit and every high-saturation prop looks like it sprung from the camped-up, tweaked-out crevices of Owsley Stanley's mind, Alun Davies is the man to call.Clients to have utilised Alun's distinctive style of art direction, costume-making and set and prop design include Adidas Originals, MAC, Puma,
Annons
, Purple and pretty much every international edition of Vogue under the sun. Which probably provides some measure of how talented the guy is. I think my chapped lips are going to get infected if I keep kissing Alun's butt this frantically, so I'll stop and let you have a look at some of the weird stuff he keeps in his jumble shop of a studio.
"Those dicks nestled in at the back there were a gift. My old studio in Bow was above a dildo factory, run by two graduates of the Royal College of Art, who were both really passionate about sex toys. They cast everything by hand, which is quite a performance, because you've got to stay hard for a long time. The guy somehow learnt a process where he could grow the dicks after he'd made the mould, so he made all these massive dildos, which are apparently based on his own dick, and gave me a couple. They made a load for Peaches' tour, actually. Y'know, the one where she had dicks dotted all over the stage."
"I always have a load of mannequin parts and bodies lying around, so they actually look less sinister up there on the wall than they do lying around on the floor."
"This crystal headpiece was for a shoot in Plastique Magazine. We got given a load of dirt bike gear, and Swarovski gave us a grand's worth of diamonds, so that's basically dirt bike armour covered in crystals. The other one is a bit fucked now, but it's from a Mad Max-inspired shoot I did with Kim Howells and Thomas Lohr, where we made a complete suit of body armour out of junk and found objects."
"The milliner Piers Atkinson made those Hollywood hats for one of his shows and gave one to me, but some girl nicked my original one in a club. So, I got Piers to make me another one with an even bigger sign on it. We made the middle one together for a video by this Welsh songwriter guy, Bright Light Bright Light. Piers painted it to give it that leather effect, and I added the unicorn horn things. The last one was another gift from Piers. He made all these crystallised, glittery bugs, which he had crawling all over the collection at his show, and made a hat with one of them for me because I did all the art direction for his lookbook."
"This headpiece was for the band Totally Extinct Enormous Dinosaurs. He has a really experimental, unusual aesthetic going on, which is great for me, because I get to work with his stylist on all this weird stuff. There aren't any real specific influences for it, it's just a lot of trial and error until we end up with the perfect creation."
"One of my interns left this gold rifle behind and never picked it up, and another one of my interns, Kim Morley, gave me that print of one of his illustrations. So I guess this is my intern appreciation corner."
