Digital Adventures

24 June 2016

As of January 18 and until December 31 2015, the Museum of Lace and Fashion invites visitors to enter the heart of the creation process, through discovering “Digital Adventures” by British design studio Modern Love.

Created in 2010 by illustrator and designer Sarah Arnett and fashion director Kim Hunt, the studio bases its designs on high-end fabrics created using artisanal methods. Modern Love conceives exclusive collections of prints for home interiors and clothing, with remarkable graphics and complex colors through their use of digital printing. Through an explosion of color and patterns, as inspiring as they are impressive, the exhibition immerses its visitors into the complete creative process. But, if you’re not lucky enough to see these Digital Adventures for yourself, The Best of Intima will lead you on a first hand experience through this 8-page extract of highlights from the exhibition.

“Flora and fauna, cultures form all over the world, cinema and geometric graphics are their main sources of inspiration.“
The contemporary production of fabric has dramatically evolved in recent years thanks to new technologies. It has also been decentralized and globalized. Faced with this phenomenon so frequently classed as standardization, the Museum of Lace and Fashion decided to explore the creativity of the young British brand, Modern Love. Sharing a passion for beauty, color, prints and design, the two founders of Modern Love draw their inspiration from flora and fauna, cultures from all over the world, cinema and geometric graphics.

At the heart of the creative process
With Digital Adventures, the Museum of Lace and Fashion invites visitors to enter the heart of the process of creation. Sarah Arnett and Kim Hunt, the dynamic duo behind the Modern Love design studio, define themselves as “digital settlers” – people who were born and raised in a non-digital world, but who integrate the use of technology in the creative process of their work. The yearlong exhibition presents digital printing technology through fabrics designed for fashion and home interiors and seeks to explore the challenging and often controversial relationship between the traditional craft work processes and digital technologies. The expertise of textile and fashion designers, and the needs or desires of the consumer, come together in these bespoke fashion pieces created using digital printing. The latter is part of a range of new technologies that are profoundly changing the apparel industry, not only in the design of clothing, but also in its value.

Multisensory experience
Built around the process of fabric manufacturing, which finds both its source of inspiration and its production methods through all things digital, the exhibition presents the rich and complex world of Modern Love: visitors discover the designers’ studio and a reconstruction of their work desk, which presents an array of different hand-crafted elements and digital productions including inspiration boards, short film extracts, digital prints and books of sketches and pattern cuttings, either physically or virtually present. At the heart of the exhibition is a selection of fashion pieces from the S/S 2015 Modern Love collection, with film and photography detailing how the work comes together, illustrated through a prolific chromatic language where flora and fauna fuse with arabesque and merge into varieties of patterns, a play of ornamental superimpositions that encompass, on occasion, the “lace effect”. To bring this journey around the Modern Love world to a close, an interactive space offers visitors the chance to see, touch and create: besides being able to touch and feel textile samples – textiles in relief created by molding, patterns produced by laser, recycling and upcycling – to testify the diversity of the materials used, an outline at visitors’ disposal provides them with an opportunity to become an apprentice textile designer and create their own patterns, which they can then photograph and send to the Modern Love blog!

Experimental topics for the public
Special moments will be organized throughout the course of the year, both through presentations by the artists themselves or specific workshops destined for art, fashion and design students, as well as others for the general public. Among some of the experimental topics for the public there will be the discovery of 3D digital printing and its impact on the manufacturing process, creating textiles with molds made by 3D digital printing, the discovery of other techniques that create patterns on fabrics without printing, such as laser, or even exploring 3D images to create virtual models and designs.

All about Modern Love
The Modern Love design studio is comprised of illustrator Sarah Arnett and fashion director Kim Hunt. They both share a passion for beauty, color and patterns and a strong interest in design. They are inspired by flora, foliage and the natural world, which is reflected in the bold, colorful pallets of their fabrics in which animals, birds and insects are interwoven with sophisticated florals. The two artists shape a personal, nostalgic response to the modern world. The themes developed in their creations constantly evolve as they add new influences from their travel and explorations. Customers of the brand are encouraged to follow the narratives and the fantasy inherent in the designs. Modern Love can be considered a lifestyle brands with an enduring design signature. After twelve years of collaborations on a variety of different projects, Modern Love was founded in 2010 by the two artists in response to a shift in their view of fashion, towards the designing of exclusive, artisan collections, in which the creation of individual pieces could be viewed and collected in the same way as one would do so with vintage pieces. The artists of Modern Love fully explore and are inspired by the freedom of digital technology, in print and design, which enables them to run limited editions or work on collaborative projects. In 2013, Modern Love completed a four-season project with Liberty of London, as part of their “Best of British” campaign. The brand has worked with other companies designing bespoke packaging and prints, and is now designing a collection of interior pieces.

“The latest collection from Modern love is illustrated through a prolific chromatic language, where flora and fauna fuse with arabesque and merge into varieties of patterns.”