Hand and Lock Embroidery

A New Hot Designer with Hand & Lock

Hand & Lock collaborated with the hot new talent Dean Quinn for his AW 2010-11 collection. Dean hasbeen recognised for designing modern, creative and wearable clothes, with beads playing a vital role throughout his collections. He has recently been quoted by Vogue as ‘a fashion gem’ and Rhianna requested to have one of his white beaded jackets from his graduate collection. A definite star in the making!

Dean’s influence for his AW2010-11 collection stemmed from the end scene of Jane Campion’s The Piano, where the piano was covered with sea urchins. This inspired Dean to play around with the possibilities of how to replicate these sea creatures using beads. Therefore this collaboration was perfect for both parties and was a particularly exciting project, as this was one of the first projects being shared between Dean, the design team at Hand & Lock and our Mumbai based embroiderers, recently entitled ‘Hand & Lock India’.

During the initial meeting with Sana Uddin, Studio Manager, Dean had provided some of his own ‘sea-urchin’ beading samples, but they needed to be designed further and developed. The key to the collaboration process was that of the development of the beading techniques. After an inspirational search through the vast archive of Hand & Lock and S. Lock’s beautiful vintage beading samples, Dean and Sana arrived at several creative solutions.

There were many issues that had to be overcome when developing samples, as beads had to stand up right against the base fabric without snagging the thread, falling in different directions and pulling too much on the weight of the fabric! All shapes and sizes of beads, fabrics, and threads were sampled and after a thorough development process of 4 weeks, the team arrived at three final and successful techniques!

‘The Porcupine’, ‘The Urchin’ and ‘The Ruffle and Zig Zag’ were the chosen techniques. The ‘Porcupine’ involved embroidering a seed bead on the base, with a 1” bugle in the middle and then a large seed bead on the tip. All of the beads were tightly embroidered together, so they had no choice but to stand upright! The ‘Urchin’ followed a similar principle but used 2 bugles with a small bead between the two, which looked totally different and less rigid as the beads were longer and able to move around more freely. The ‘Ruffle and Zig Zag’ consisted of using 3cm widths of tulle which were then ruffled by hand and then embroidered with 1cm bugle beads in a zig zag pattern which gave the beads that extra 3-D look.

Colour was also a key factor for this collection, as Dean has specially stated he wanted to try colour for the first time! With this in mind, they combined 1” gun metal bugles with white seed beads, and 1” black bugles with electric blue seed beads for the ‘porcupine’ design. The colours of the ‘urchin’ ranged from 1” gunmetal bugles with silver lined and black seed beads and 1” silver lined bugles with black seed beads on the tips. Red, electric blue, white and silver we used for the 1cm bugle beads for the ‘ruffle and zigzag’ design, to boost the overall colour in each garment and all variations looked amazing!
The weight and density of the bugles was a slight issue once the ‘porcupine’ and ‘urchin’ pattern pieces had been beaded as they were very heavy but fortunately for Dean had not distorted their wool base. The shoulder piece ‘urchin’ had also really expanded in size, due to the nature of the beads falling freely and in different directions, so instead of using both the front and back of the shoulder pieces, Dean ended up only using one piece, which was large enough to fit around a whole shoulder!

Once the garments were all made up, the effect of each beading technique was fantastic. The creative beading techniques really transformed the collection. The ‘porcupine’ and ‘urchin’ looked really sharp and striking, yet the softness of the ruffled tulle with the small bugle beads created a good balance, and helped to co-ordinate those garments with no beading or only small areas. The collaboration was brilliant and fun from start to finish and the collection showed to Hand & Lock that Dean is really worthy of his ‘fashion gem’ status!