Jorge Ayala is a Mexican architect and fashion designer with a studio in Paris. He is quite accomplished with an eclectic coterie of clients that range from Louis Vuitton (luxury) to Swarovski (crystal) to Franck Provost (hair styling) to Google (technology), and he also has a fashion line called JAP (Jorge Ayala Paris), which is both for men and for women.

Thus, while browsing through the racks during fashion PR agency open day at a showroom in Paris last November, we discovered part of the Jorge Ayala SS16 collection in outstanding colors and with voluptuous digital prints and designs.  The fabrics were advanced and the press officer related that the collection may have been used for Google Mexico, which kind of made sense, because when you think of Mexico you think about colors, and when you think about Google, you think about different (primary) colors too.

And because the items are unisex the involuntary image that came to mind was Google ‘interns’ sitting somewhere in Mexico somehow wearing Jorge Ayala’s latest SS16 collection in some outdoor cafeteria or ‘third space’ trying to hack each other’s laptops in the spirit of some form of friendly competition in order to prove themselves to have the necessary ‘creativity’ for the job for which they are applying. A form of creativity and a competition which of course necessarily also extends to shape, color, form and style.

[Ay]A (Ayala Architecture) was launched by Jorge in 2011 and is a company which works and experiments with applied arts & designs while using different materials and techniques used in architecture in order to enhance visual merchandising, as well as product & clothing design. Hence JAP as the embodiment of the fashion line.  And hence that Jorge calls himself boldly ‘a producer of culture’ and a ‘post-digital artisan’.  This, because he uses analog forms of materials known to architecture but decorates, and prints, and tattoos them with digital drawing and designs born out of 3D modelling in order to create the outstanding quality of his collections.

Here is an example of method and material that Jorge works with technically applied from the realm of architecture:

• laminated silk
• pleated laser cuts
• tattooed leathers
• building fabrics & textile

That the results are surprising and beautiful we do not have to explain to you, so we’ll leave Jorge – the artist as critic – with the last word when he describes what he thinks fashion design also has in common with architectural design:  ‘Precision, structure, engineering, texture, material, assembly, and innovation’.

Posted by Sandro and photos by Mous.