Emperor Moth

Client: Ellaventures

Location: London

Completion: 2006

Brief: To design a vibrant store (including logo and packaging) full of exuberance and energy, celebrating the arrival in London of Moscow based fashion brand Emperor Moth and showcasing its colourful and richly textured clothes.

To create a Mount Street retail space truly inspired by the clothes on display, we liberated all voids within the site, removing unnecessary objects and structures from the interior and facades to create a single uninterrupted space. We then inserted a multi-faceted, reflective tent made up of 312 poly-carbon mirrors (designed and cut by a computer to ensure a perfect fit) into the emptiness created, concealing all trace of what was there before.

This mirrored cavern, inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, took the intense colours of the clothes and bounced them around the space to kaleidoscopic effect, blurring the boundaries between what was real and what was reflection.  A vivid sky blue resin floor provided a cool, fresh pool of colour, a visual anchor from which you could enjoy the dazzling rainbow shades of the garments all around.

To further activate the shop we inserted dancing mannequins, powered by motors and pulleys, to bring the clothes to life, helping customers to see them in action and from all angles, as opposed to static as when folded or hung on rails.

Taking inspiration from the novel ‘The Master and Margarita’ (much of which is set around Patriarchs Pond in Moscow near the clothing brand’s Russian flagship store) we populated the shop further with a series of hand crafted, full sized, multi-coloured animals, designed to form enticing seats for customers. To add to this vibrant menagerie, coat hangers for the clothes were formed from soft fabric puppet characters that appeared to bite into the clothes hanging from the rail.