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Sunday, 17 December 2006 | Levent OZLER
Emerging Fashion Label Romeo & Hyde
How does one recognise creativity, what are its component elements? The usual adjectives; originality, authenticity, novel all seem to require further elaboration with reference to other prevailing norms. What about conflict and integration? How does any artist bring a new vision to the dead weight of conformity; and how, especially in the fashion world of seasonal fast track markets, would a new designer find his muse or seek to make his vision explicit?
Stuart Bamford, the Australian designer behind Romeo and Hyde is not your usual chalk fingered habitué of the catwalk; a successful rugby player and a trained teacher, his nomadic journey has been courageous. It involved pulling up all his roots and his family's expectations to follow his need to create. He tried many things, music, writing, painting; none gave him a voice of his own, but fashion settled the argument.
Having fixed on his direction, his training required further sacrifice; of his country. Like many colonials he was aware that pioneering enterprise was not enough, he needed wider and more traditional frames of reference, so the Capital of fashion, Milan was his choice of school, where he would certainly sink if he could not swim. Having completed his training, he travelled via Japan to the United Kingdom, integrating new threads of artistic influence. From Japanese art the economy of sinuous line and restrained colour; from Italy he retained his appreciation of material and the sharp profile, clear of clutter or elaboration, but it was in Edinburgh's grey austerity that he found his own integration.
Hence the name; Romeo for his romantic conviction that clothes can enhance and embody an love of the unique, the spontaneous, the passionate, and Hyde for the secret, disciplined and hidden alter ego, never wholly complete, always searching. The marriage makes for quality, balance and fun, always travelling. His launch range of jeans (made in the soft rare Japanese denim he sourced and secured) exemplify his sophisticated eye, but quietly. They make room for the individual wearing them, dressed up or down and then forgotten.
Other sources of renewal remain the arts, music above all and in the case of these jeans, the inspiration was a poem by Patti Smith which ends with an appropriate line... 'don't forget who you are'. Her New York rawness of seventies Rock somehow seemed to unite all the elements important to his own journey, and starting with jeans meant tilting at windmills. That is where he began.
This subtle understated collection can be visited on http://www.romeoandhyde.com
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