Lara Stone Stars in Fashion Editorial Debut Double Woolmark Prize Winner Matty Bovan

Today, Matty Bovan’s hair is bright yellow. His eyes were painted with two curved black curls that ran down his temples, and his nails glittered with sapphire. I saw this, because she waved a crochet hook as a nice greeting over a Zoom call. “I’m knitting something for next season, keep my hands busy!” he stated. “I found it really therapeutic, you know, so I just kept it up.” Bovan is here to talk about another Zoom call that’s happening exactly where he is now—the studio at his late grandmother’s York home—where he recently won the Woolmark Prize and the Karl Lagerfeld Award for Additional Innovation for 2021. It’s been kind of crazy. ” He stopped. “It’s like two different worlds, almost. I am very flattered and happy.”

Louie Banks

Louie Banks

You can see exactly what will fascinate, impress—and quite possibly surprise—the International Woolmark Awards judges when they look at Matty as he explains his entry on screen from this room. He’s in York, in the North of England. “Funny,” he chuckled. “A lot of people misheard. I sometimes get letters addressed to Matty Bovan, New York, England.” But no: Bovan was a pioneer of localism, designing and manufacturing clothes outside the fashion capital system. Just a few years ago, it seemed impossible to match anything that was acceptable to the company. Yet the extraordinary life of this skinny, multitasking thirty-one-year-old British man is testament to the survival of what his generation believed in: local production, crafts, the power of hands-on creativity, gender-degrading clothing and a whole lot more.

Louie Banks

Something yellow quickly formed in Bovan’s hand as he spoke. It’s a color not far from her current hair color—because there’s always a flow between looks and ideas which is manifested in the very inventive woven, knit, and printed things from her collection. That’s what happened to this fashion rule breaker since he was roughly fourteen—long before he graduated from his MA Central Saint Martins course in 2015. Scroll down through his Instagram account, @babbym, and there’s proof: happy family. photos of teenager Matty at his home in Yorkshire circa early 2000s, with red and white striped hair, with his mother and grandmother, who taught him to crochet and knit, beaming beside him.

Louie Banks

There was a moment of enlightenment when his tutor at CSM MA, the late Professor Louise Wilson, saw his first year design work and turned it down. The visionary teacher persuaded her that what she wore when she walked into class—homemade dresses and different experiments with makeup and hair color every day—was far more attractive than what she tried to project as “fashion” to others. “Louise insisted: you need to take pictures of what you wear every day. He told me to document it, and work from it. And then it felt like, oh okay, what I did was right.

In college, they’re like, ‘No: just do who you are, and improve on that.’ I mean, it’s interesting, because I think that’s what a lot of people are doing now.”

From that point on, with all the gorgeous homemade collections, cobwebs, knits, fluoros, and pastels, Matty Bovan’s cult fame exploded. Before the pandemic, supermodels were always eager to step forward for her. Her performances at London Fashion Week—a spectacle where the luxury of her handcrafted ball gowns wowed the press—had the backing of stylist Katie Grand, and brands like MAC and Coach, who wanted to collaborate with her. At the Spring 2019 show, Vivienne Westwood sat next to flamboyant designer mom, Plum Bovan. Backstage, Westwood made sure he found a TV camera to pass on his compliments: “Matty Bovan, he’s a real punk, you know.”

Louie Banks

Well, maybe Dame Vivienne is right in some ways—all the DIY, off-system British-indie way—but Matty Bovan’s aura is something of a tumble 180 degrees away from the punk revolt of forty years ago. His work fits the profile of Britain’s eccentric tradition in a very different way. Bovan never made anything in black. He is a down to earth imaginative force with a polite and open-minded confidence in who he is
and how it works. There was joy in all the colorful subversions she knitted, knitted, and printed into collections like the ocean-inspired Woolmark she spoke that day to Thom Browne, Tim Blanks, Carine Roitfeld, and other judges who zoomed in on her work. vestibule from New York, Paris, London and Australia on the day he convinced them he had to be the double winner this year.

Part of the Woolmark challenge—and the opportunity for Bovan—is to prove how young talent can apply sustainability when using wool; in particular, fine Merino wool. “I want to try and explain to people that the stuff I make is very limited,” he said. “A lot of love and time went into each piece. I try and make everything special and unique because I think that’s also what people are responding to now. I think this makes sense for fashion, as it went from thousands of anonymously produced works, to [a position where] people actually want to know, ‘How did you make this? How long will it last? Where was it made? And what is it made of?’”

Louie Banks

The overlay of patterned pannier dresses she made—a pirate skirt resembling a ship’s sail—was a specially designed Merino wool jacquard, which she had made with Hainsworth, the factory that had established, among other things, making uniforms for royal regiments. Woolmark support for this project is open to it. “I could never set foot in the door, because they were so established. I was able to work with them, submitting artwork to work on their digital loom, which was great.” Undeterred by working during lockdown, he found a local woman skilled in knitting and crochet “not far from me,” boiling a pot of dye and painting the rest by hand in his home studio to get the vibrant color he wanted. The rest, he makes from leftover yarn on a hand-operated knitting machine.

Louie Banks

He never really thought about emphasizing his ongoing credentials, but a photo documentary he made of his process for the Woolmark jury states that for the first time. “I’ve always worked like this, but suddenly I realized, maybe I should be more transparent about it,” he said. “I never throw anything away, and the machine I have doesn’t use electricity. I try to explain how many are direct, and how we work with local factories. So I kept a kind of diary about it.”

Maybe it was—proof that something so creative without limits could still be made during the confines of last winter’s lockdown that led the jury to side with Bovan. “I guess I poured so much into the collection because it felt like a really dark time,” he mused. But in a way, it brought him back to his former full circle. “I remember trying to do all of this since I was a teenager, so it’s kind of like getting back into that headroom, by being a really good DIY. I love the idea of ​​cooking something on the stove and seeing what comes out. When I was a kid, my mother used to do that, coloring tablecloths in the garden all the time. Trust me,” he laughed. “It was very vague, because at fifteen I didn’t know anything, but there’s still a lot of that DNA in me now. It hasn’t really gone away yet, because it all comes down to self-expression. ”

Louie Banks

Louie Banks

What will he do now that he has earned the award and financial boost of the two Woolmark prizes? “I’m still very surprised and grateful that I won, because obviously there’s a very talented lineup of people, and you lose perspective, you know, you did the best you could but you don’t know the result. ,” he said with characteristic humility. “Now, it’s just kind of pushing every button I can think of, pushing the skills a little further, and trying to learn more about them and trying to also explain more to people who are interested in the job.”

Louie Banks

He has no plans to return to the stage anytime soon—the next collection will be back in film form. And neither will he leave his studio, nor the network of local suppliers and craftsmen he built and relied on. This does not mean that his international reach as a leader in an ethically independent and creative style will diminish—in fact, he intends to build it through his direct-to-consumer business, right where he is. In a world where so many creative young people think and act the same way, Bovan is an inspiration to a generation. “Home is my happy place,” he said with a smile. “There’s freedom in it. And, you know, it was fun.”

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