Fitting Photos
Matty Bovan’s spring/summer 2022 collection (image: Ruth Hogben).
On 11 September 2017, in a room in Yorkshire, designer Matty Bovan is photographing himself wearing different assemblages of textiles. They are not-quite garments, rich in colour and texture and shaped into various silhouettes, waxing and waning in their recognisability as clothes.
In one photo, a red and white intarsia knit hangs from Bovan’s waist, something between a skirt and a jumper worn upside down, the irregular hem dropping, like its arms, about his knees. Various side-on shots show experiments with bursts of tulle; another outfit features a quilted and appliquéd breastplate of sorts, laced-up down one side through oversized eyelets. A top is made of knitted panels pieced together, seemingly unfinished and still with the contrasting cast-on waste yarn, which is used to start off on a knitting machine, but usually discarded later.
When Bovan took those photographs, he was five days away from his spring/summer 2018 show at London Fashion Week. These are fitting photos for that show, and the textiles they document are the final garments’ nascent forms. You may not be familiar with what fitting photos are, but you’ll immediately realise that they aren’t the kind of high-production value fashion photography usually seen in magazines or across online platforms. These photos have a different format, quality, and purpose, used by the studio to document work in progress. “I have always taken a lot – I must have thousands and thousands of photographs,” Bovan tells me. “They’re something I enjoy, but they’re also important for me to realise characters and shapes.”
Fittings are a necessary part of fashion design; there is only so much you can do without a human body. Even when working with a standard shape, a change of fabric or an added detail or finishing can derail things. Of course, there is the tailor’s dummy (or dress form, or stand): a mannequin made for designing rather than displaying, featuring a linen covering that allows fabric to be pinned to it. It’s a well-crafted, valuable tool, but also has its limitations: for one thing, they don’t typically come with arms (although these can be purchased separately, and the leading UK manufacturer Kennett & Lindsell now makes attachable heads). The mannequin is less malleable than the human body, and in its solidity leaves much of the garment untested: will the garment hold a breast securely, will the seam hold its line, or twist at the hips?
Designers all have their own ways of working. Some drape from a roll of fabric, others take apart vintage garments, or else collage directly to the body with found objects or photocopy mock-ups. This process isn’t always legible in the finished garment, but it can be discerned in the fitting photo. Who the model for these images is also varies. Some designers work with the same fitting model for years, perhaps chosen for their ideal proportions, or because they function as muse, effortlessly corralling fledgling ideas into the designer’s vision. Others, such as Bovan, use themselves.
Fitting photographs are typically kept in-studio, and are infrequently published in any form. “They’re mostly pinned onto a board and I study them,” says Bovan, which is what makes his recent decision to display a number of his photographs on billboards across Manchester and Sheffield in the north of England unusual. The billboards are a project with Jack Arts, an organisation that seeks to promote the arts in urban spaces, and they show 20 fitting photos taken from 10 seasons of Bovan’s work. These are images that, he explained in a statement released alongside the project, “just happened at that time, with no thought of them ever being shown like this, and that allows them a certain freedom and sense of their own identity.” Not leaving them entirely as found images, Bovan has designed the billboard displays themselves. He has arranged the images and added his logo, as well as including QR codes that link to a related installation at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s (YSP) Bothy Gallery, Boomerang, in which visitors are invited to try on a number of Bovan’s creations. “This whole project is really about challenging your own self image,” he says.
Some of the photos seem purely documentarian, although they are often accessorised post-capture with computer-drawn squiggles: a heart, an X, an imaginary lasso pooling at Bovan’s feet. Others create narratives for Bovan’s world through make-up, styling, and evocative, performative poses. These are less like a standard fitting photo and more like the images found in his various side projects, which offer him creative release and allow him to test out ideas: zines such as 2018’s NEED4MEAD, or the football-themed BOVAN Butterfly FC, which featured screenprinted football jersey T-shirts. “[L]ike all humans I have a lot of different emotions inside of me, and sometimes they come out in this way, sometimes they don’t,” Bovan tells me. The fittings are where “I learn about the character for that collection,” he says. In trying on different shapes and bringing in different materials, these characters mature and come to life.
If you compare these fitting photos to the final catwalk images, it is clear that some of the garments’ form has already been decided: the materials, their arrangement, the silhouette. But other elements are still in flux, perhaps unfinished or yet to be added. If you came across these images, you might be unconvinced by what you see, but they represent a crucial moment in the designs’ formation. The fitting photo provides a chance to stop and reflect; the photos can be lined up together, collaged, drawn on, details scaled-up or else repeated in Adobe Photoshop. But looking back through my own – I’ve amassed thousands of these from working as a fashion designer myself, all different according to the studios I’ve been in – they are alive with far more. They document the action of design – the moments where the clothing is made or destroyed, as well as the atmosphere and actions around it. Sometimes a level of discomfort in the participants is palpable: the model, scared to move for the abundance of pins close to their skin; the trepidatious assistant poised just out of shot, about to be asked to cut into a garment, all the while hoping that they have interpreted their boss’s instruction correctly; the glint in the eye of the production manager, not only registering the possibility that their work may be about to be destroyed, but also a beautifully made piece of clothing that they perhaps hoped to gift to a relative or friend.
Fitting photos sometimes hint at the lack of glamour behind fashion, so often presented as the glossiest of design industries. From couture salons to cold warehouse studios, fittings are known for their long and tiring days: hard work for the unflinching models as well as for the designers. In writing this essay, I was reminded of the specific manner of passing pins that they require. Trying to fish them out, two at a time and right-end-first from an angry haystack of needles, and then guiding them to the busy (too busy to look) hands of the senior designer, all without pricking their fingers (and temper). I feel amused – and perhaps vindicated – by an anecdote from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s studio, retold in Mary Blume’s 2013 biography of the couturier, The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World, which echoes this. “[We] passed the pins,” Blume reports one designer explaining, “they had to be passed a certain way and we couldn’t pass them fast enough”. Here, the pin-passer in question just happens to be Hubert de Givenchy, speaking shortly after setting up his own eponymous house. As Givenchy continues, he conjures the sense of awe around the fit, comparing the humble pin to the surgeon’s knife. “[We] could see the woman starting to straighten up. It was wonderful to see, little by little, and just with pins, the body rebalance itself. It was plastic surgery to the highest degree.”
Returning to Bovan’s photos, there is less of this rarefied atmosphere conjured by Givenchy, and instead a backdrop of domesticity – green carpet, panelled wardrobe doors. It is, in fact, the Yorkshire house of his late grandmother, from which he still works. For Bovan, whose work is inspired by his own style, family, and local area, this link to his personal life is fitting. “All these aspects are deep rooted in myself and my work, so it’s natural they come out,” he explains. In interviews he frequently mentions how his grandmother and mother inspired him, both for their glamour and their creative skills. The former taught him how to crochet, while the latter made things around the house throughout his childhood and now creates the accessories for his collections. But it wasn’t until Bovan passed through Central Saint Martins’ (CSM) Fashion MA that course leader Louise Wilson prompted him to connect the clothes that he made for himself with a wider fashion practice. When tasked with formally designing, he “just couldn’t see it,” he explains to me, and it was Wilson who planted the seed of using himself as his own fitting model. “[She] told me to document my outfit every day on a self timer, and this is really how I have worked ever since.”
Not that there is anything quotidian about Bovan’s work. The “granny crochet” and blown-up family photos in his spring/summer 2022 collection take his familial history and twist it into something altogether more surreal, while Bovan’s own otherworldly look – with ever changing combinations of pastel-hued hair and bright make-up on an alternately moustachioed or clean-shaven face – means that he easily inhabits his garments, shapeshifting in and out of character. As a teenager he discovered the artist Cindy Sherman, who uses her own image as a base from which to create “self-portraits” of a vast array of luridly rendered personas. “And it made total sense to me that we all have these characters inside us,” Bovan says. A career trajectory such as his – passing through CSM, the mentorship scheme of Fashion East and sponsorship from BFC Newgen, and onto winning two awards at the 2021 Woolmark Prize (with a combined prize money of $300,000 AUD) – could easily have become a story of leaving behind a regional town for international acclaim. But Bovan continues to live and work in Yorkshire, and remains invested in the area. He is drawn to ideas and tales of Englishness, whether Horatio Nelson or football culture, as well as the city of York’s chequered history. “The medieval, the Tudor, the Roman, the Viking; it’s romantic and cruel at the same time,” he told Jack Arts. But, as he explains to me, it is an Englishness that is evolving. He highlights his grandfather’s emigration from former Yugoslavia, adding, “I understand Englishness [as] more of an abstract concept that I like to pull and stretch into my own world.” Like one of his inspirations, Vivienne Westwood, with whom his work shares common elements, Bovan embraces British traditions and tropes, but joyfully works to turn them on their head. “I love that England has all these different aspects blended into it,” he says. “We need that to move forward and progress.”
Bovan’s billboards are explicitly rooted in the North, with their connected installation, Boomerang, taking place at a cultural venue that Bovan has visited since childhood. “The YSP is pretty close to where I grew up,” he says, “and for me it made total sense to have all this beautiful sculpture and art amongst the vast beautiful Yorkshire landscape.” The intention of both Boomerang and the billboards, he says, is to encourage creativity in his area, something which he has previously pursued through frequent public workshops and teaching at local universities. “I imagine myself as a teenager in the North,” Bovan says of his billboards. “I would have definitely never seen anything like this, especially not in that context.” He explains that presenting different aspects of his work – fitting photos, zines, sketches – can challenge assumptions of what a designer is and does, as well as ideas of how creativity can be expressed. “It’s good to challenge peoples idea of fashion, art and British creativity in particular,” he says.
Like the billboards, Boomerang is not a typical cultural encounter. It was created to offer the public an opportunity to try on and play with Bovan’s clothing, but participants were required to have smartphones locked away before engaging with the installation. “This was the starting point,” he says, “no phones and no cameras.” It may be strange for a project about fitting photos to end with a disavowal of the manner in which most people engage with photography, but Bovan says that he wanted to remove the temptation for participants to post pictures straight to social media. “Over recent years I have been fascinated with the idea of cultural capital,” he says. “More specifically how people attend art galleries and spaces to just take a photo for their social media and leave, posting the image pretty much instantly to use it as a badge of worth or status symbol.” Participants knew that Boomerang was still being documented, just by a photographer hidden behind a two-way mirror, with the images to be later compiled into a zine. “Zines for me are an important creative release,” says Bovan. “I can just have fun and explore ideas I would never explore in my mainline collections. It’s a very instinctual way of working, collaborating, or reusing photos.”
Boomerang included a small number of archive pieces, but was predominantly built around custommade new garments that could be worn over clothes. These garments, like those in the fitting photos, are unfinished. Bovan likens them to musicians’ demos – still open-ended, or mere sketches, but though which he could invite people into the process. He hoped that participants, denied the “instant gratification” of posting to social media, would instead “think, make instinctual decisions, have fun, feel something and explore their own sense of identity, and ultimately their own sense of memory”. Nevertheless, he says that he was taken aback by people’s willingness to experiment and the emotional involvement in doing so. “I was shocked how nearly everyone went in full throttle, experimenting with their own image multiple times in their sessions,” he says. “It was a bigger success than I could imagine, and the space felt so special and magical almost, so personal and private. I felt privileged.”
As Bovan’s assessment of the magic of the installation suggests, there is something enchanting about the fitting process. Certainly, I have long been fascinated by the fitting photo. I remember my excitement on discovering a section of them in the 2009 book, Prada: Creativity, Modernity, Innovation, which gives an unusual degree of insight into the workings of the brand through behind-the-scenes imagery: skilled hands holding shoe lasts or passing fabric through a machine, as well as photographs of the elaborate show spaces designed in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO. But most thrilling to me were the fitting photos. These are unpolished, taken at various locations around the design studio, with boxes, samples and prints strewn about as people work in the background. In each image the model is wearing, or sometimes holding, a mix of garments and approximations of them: samples, some pinned and cut to shape; found materials, such as a green swathe of plastic netting; or print-outs of detail or pattern, Xeroxed to the desired scale. There are also non-fashion items of clothing – rubber galoshes, wellington boots – caught in the process of becoming fashion. Believing, at this point, may be difficult. Sometimes the photos show only a mess of parts, a promise written in a broken language of materials and clothing, each with its own associations – military surplus, fisherman, 80s, girlish – but dislocated such that all meaning becomes slippery. The character is coming to life, but is only on the cusp of doing so, and this loads the photos with a tension: there’s a risk that in making the garment real that poetry will be lost, accidentally designed or commercially smoothed away. A certain bulk removed, or a more precarious joining solidified.
For Bovan, the making of fashion and the exploring of identity are processes that are entwined. In both there is a fragility, an unselfconsciousness at risk of being shot down – including by self-censure – but what Boomerang showed, where he asked participants to trust and see the results later, is that given space, something new is able to take root. Similarly, in Bovan’s fitting photos, and to a certain extent in his finished garments, he doesn’t feel the need to smooth his garments’ edges or rationalise their more thrilling excesses. He keeps their volumes – leg-of-mutton sleeves, a top like a ship’s sail, panniers with added pleats – and allows them to speak. Any tension, held in place, bubbles over into excitement. In recent years, more fashion designers have begun to share their fitting photos on social media, but the garments they reveal tend to be late-stage and mostly finished, lacking the openness of those in Prada’s or Bovan’s photos. They are telling, not showing; nothing is at stake, nor is there a way in.
Fashion has a specific intimacy as a design form. It takes ideas – colours, shapes, associations, memories – and tests how a body, in such close proximity, fits within them. I think of one billboard, where Bovan adopts a wide-legged stance, limbs stretching out the fabric in a fashion that reminds me of the dancer Martha Graham’s 1930s performance Lamentation, in which her movements were defined – both emphasised and limited – by the tubular garment of stretch fabric that she wore. I mention this because of the forces clearly at play between body and garment in Graham’s work, but there are less obvious tensions to be found too. Design cannot grow without remembering, testing and reflecting. This is visible in both Bovan’s work, thought, and openness to the public – but also the fitting photograph in general: both a stillness, of shapes respected and documented, as well as the opportunity, and difficulty, of finding yourself searching for something new.
Words Sophie Tolhurst
Photographs Billboard images by Jonny Myatt, courtesy of Jack Arts; fashion images from Matty Bovan’s spring/summer 2022 collection by Ruth Hogben.
This article was originally published in Disegno #31. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
1 See ‘Design for a Rural Mexico’ by Martha Pskowski and Carlos Álvarez Montero, published in Disegno #22.