English (UK)

The Creators Project: Most of your clothes are very busy, but in a good way. There’s so much going on with the prints, but at the same time it all comes together. Can you pinpoint a source of inspiration for this stuff?
Carri Mundane: It’s about visual noise. Even with the way things are styled, it’s like a visual kind of noise all over the prints. For instance, something I recently designed was based on what I’ll call an ape mist – I wanted to make this monster ape outfit. I see faces in everything; I turn around and see faces. I know it’s quite psychedelic, but…

Thomas Manaton: We take all these distortions and try to reconfigure them into something recognizable, rather than it being absolute chaos and abstract noise. We try to refigure that so it looks a bit more like “things."

You’ve only recently started to work on clothes that are specifically womenswear. Has that been challenging?
Carri Mundane: Up until recently I had only made custom stuff for MIA and stuff for myself. It’s always been a unisex brand, and I’ve only started to do womenswear now.
Thomas Manaton: We use really basic pieces of technology, like glitter brushes that people use to put glitter on their MySpace profiles. People can look at our stuff and think, “It’s done," but we understand the type of people who use that type of technology and who would appreciate our clothes. We just want to put it on a higher level — making stuff with that technology on a different scale.

There are many recurring elements in your work. Do they represent themes or other things you think about a lot?
Carrie Mundane: I’m pretty obsessed with volcanoes. I know why I’m obsessed but… Tom, I like your theory. Do you want to explain it?
Thomas Manaton: I like volcanoes because they’re the only way to create a new landmass or a place for a new civilization to exist. You know, it can burst out of the sea – a new island where you’ve got this new area. Is that what you’re on about?
Carrie Mundane: Yeah, it’s about destruction. Volcanoes represent chaos and the apocalypse. You’ve got to destroy stuff before you can make something new. The earth is controlling it. I like a sort of 12 Monkeys style where things go back to nature and nature starts taking over again.

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