Nendo x Jil Sander: Fashion Meets Photography At The Salone

At last week’s Salone, the Jil Sander showroom at Via Luca Baltrami 5 had a line stretching far out the door. And no wonder. After all, not only was Nendo’s fashion collaboration with the fashion label on show; this was also the site of Nendo’s Invisible Outlines solo exhibition where 16 of the studio’s projects were being presented (see Nendo’s Jellyfish vases).

Back to Nendo’s project with Jil Sander… the design studio’s Objectextile collection for the fashion brand, which is known for its monochromatic wearables, asymmetric cuts and use of colour-blocking, was inspired by the patterns captured on camera.

Nendo constructed and shot a range of transparent boxes, using lighting, shadows and a variety of different shooting methods and angles to create patterns in shades of grey.

Since all the objects were pure white, the shadows and appearances captured could change dramatically with a slight alteration in the setting of the lighting or depth of field.

Check patterns were made by photographing tightly woven threads in a cube, while dot patterns were achieved by capturing the depth of 82 pieces of floating cones in a similar square frame.

For the camouflage pattern, the studio played with layers of acrylic sheets and created designs resulting from the differences in the frost and clear finishes.

In total, five designs, including dotted, pixelated, camouflage, checked and striped prints were created for use in Jil Sander’s capsule collection of scarves, trainers, bags and T-shirts.