Aitor Throup is gearing up to debut a men’s wear label, WWD has learned.
The Buenos Aires-born and Burnley, England-raised designer, known for his highly conceptualized fashion, said this project marks “the biggest thing I’ve ever worked on, I’m nearing the completion of my vision, which has been 15 years in the making, and I’m near the end of it.”
The new men’s brand, the name of which is being kept under wraps, will make its debut later this year before fully seeing the light in 2020.
Throup, who had served as G-Star’s executive creative director overseeing the men’s and women’s mainline ranges and the Raw Research men’s line since 2016, last year parted ways amicably with the Amsterdam-based label co-owned by Pharrell Williams.
Prior to his appointment at G-Star, Throup had launched his conceptual men’s label New Object Research, which debuted on the London Fashion Week: Men’s calendar in 2013. In 2016 the designer hosted a performance-presentation hybrid in a deconsecrated church in Marylebone.
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The men’s label blending fashion, design and the arts paved the way for the development of the new project debuting this year. “New Object Research was a part of this process, this exploration that has allowed me to develop a new platform, a new brand, a new vision that will be my lasting and permanent statement in the fashion/art context,” Throup explained.
According to the designer, the new brand, developed by the designer’s A.T. Studio located in a repurposed cotton mill in Burnley, England, will encompass a “conceptual exploration of all the narratives as metaphors for my own story.”
“When I did my last New Object Research show in 2016 it was the beginning of the realization that I have gathered the tools and the ability to create a design language, a point of view that is self-enclosed, a self-enclosed design system that allows me to have a voice as a designer and as an artist that doesn’t have to be about something else. They can be an expression of who I am,” he underscored.
“When you design from the inside out there’s nothing there to visualize because you’re true to the creation process, when you start from the inside out is what I call working anatomically…exploring the why, the nonphysical and nonvisual, [which] is an ethereal concept. If you commit yourself to the why, you commit yourself to the vision of creation, not the purpose,” he explained.
Although secretive about designs and styles, Throup stressed the three-year process has allowed him to free his mind and establish a framework for his design research to focus on the three pillars expressing the “anatomy of the self”: the spirit, the mind and the body.
“My work in the past was very much ruled by the mind, incredibly systematic, incredibly structured and I wasn’t allowed to play within that. My spirit was quite suppressed and my sketches and journey kept reminding me of my inner child, my inner spirit as a creator,” Throup explained.
“It’s a big philosophical statement and it’s going to be my most conceptual, in a way my most cultured, but also my most commercial [project],” he offered. “I don’t want it to be a one-off thing…I decided to not work on any other project for this reason, I set up a new studio only to focus on this and to finish the development of this,” he concluded.
After completing his bachelor’s in fashion design at Manchester Metropolitan University and earning his master’s in men’s wear from London’s Royal College of Art in 2006, Throup has developed a multidisciplinary approach to design, leading him to eventually explore different territories including fashion projects with Stone Island, C.P. Company and Umbro, as well as music, serving as creative director of British rock band Kasabian and art directing the group’s frontman Sergio Pizzorno’s new solo project called “The S.L.P.”