What happens when a centuries-old piece of cloth refuses to settle into a single form? For creative studio Clarke & Reilly, led by Bridget Dwyer and David Grocott, textiles aren’t static materials to be cut and finalized—they are living vessels of time, touch, and continuous transformation. Unveiled at Dover Street Market Paris, their exhibition IN/FORM obliterates the traditional design arc that insists raw material must resolve into a permanent, finished object.
The project centers on antique fabric fragments carrying centuries of sun-bleaching, hand-mending, and visible wear—flaws that the duo treat not as damage to hide, but as the foundational soul of the work. Teaming up with AnOther Magazine fashion director Katie Shillingford and photographer Ben Toms, the studio puts the archive through a radical, multi-stage experiment in fluid form. Nothing is cut or sewn; instead, Shillingford drapes, knots, and drapes the ancient fabrics directly onto human bodies—wrapping models in clashing lengths of 200-year-old ticking stripe and wrecked rose silk against a bruised red backdrop painted with fragments of text by critic Susannah Frankel.
Once captured on camera, the garments are deliberately dismantled. Unpinned and unknotted back to their raw states, the very same textiles undergo a second metamorphosis—this time wound, bound, and threaded around antique furniture pieces by David Grocott. Georgian armchairs vanish under layers of antique lace, and wrought-iron chandeliers are shrouded in grey cloth, transforming functional household objects into haunting, sculptural silhouettes.
