Although Ponte appears to have arrived on the scene totally fashioned, the items you see listed here are described as its third “sequence” and have been created by one Harry Pontefract, an elusive Englishman who views this venture as “ongoing physique of labor” that dates again to his days at Central Saint Martins when he was up all by means of the evening making and taking orders for one-off items made out of previous suitcases and his mom’s linens after which going “in for a crit’ at 6AM and being shouted at for not having sufficient work,” as he put it on a name. Promoting these items helped towards tuition, and the artist remembers these occasions as being thrilling, if difficult. Publish commencement he landed in Paris the place he hung out at Loewe earlier than returning to London and returning his consideration to Ponte.
Harry shares the title Pontefract with a city in West Yorkshire. The origins of this moniker are Latin and it interprets to “damaged bridge,” which feels one way or the other important in gentle of the truth that the designer is breaking with custom in his multidisciplinary method to Ponte, which could discover expression as vogue or music or artwork or some mixture of the above. “Contradictory” appears to be one in every of Pontefract’s favourite phrases—and state of being. He may describe a glance as “pure intercourse” or “our type of a Chanel Catherine Deneuve swimsuit” or “essentially the most unsuitable cocktail costume on the planet,” however on the similar time he values open endedness and believes that how folks “learn” his designs reveal a lot about themselves.
Pontefract’s work is a bridge, to not nowhere, however right into a world with no fastened coordinates. But it does have some constants; the designer is enthusiastic about creating characters. Physicality and a sculptural sense are current. Exactitude (word the rigorously misplaced shoulders or the artfully undone waistbands, that are hooked up to rigorously sourced jock straps) is balanced by spontaneity. Look one, and others, have been made within the studio with fleeces delivered from identified sources. Shearling got here from a enterprise down the road from the designer, the textile used for the pink shirt and pants is the liner of army sleeping baggage, and the re-examination was from classic M65 military jackets. Pontefract reveals himself to be a person of eager sensitivity: “When you begin to take them aside they usually have the recollections of whoever’s been carrying them in all of the seams and all the pieces, they’re such loaded clothes. Even simply doing one thing in that coloration, by no means thoughts out of previous jackets, goes to be loaded…” On the similar time, he stated, “I feel there’s a tenderness there and a frailty about doing such a generic archetype, which I really like. I discover it lovely, the banality of [this look] subsequent to one thing like the primary look particularly, and I suppose if you wish to go into it, I’m positive they do relate to me within the type of brutality of each of them.”
