Do Not Ask Emerging Designer Harikrishnan About His Inflatable Trousers

Emerging menswear designer Harikrishnan set Instagram alight, when he sent models wearing inflatable latex trousers of balloon-like proportions down the runway during his graduate show at London College of Fashion.

The idea for the exaggerated silhouettes first occurred to the 26 year old student from Kerala when he was walking his dog, Kai. Imagining how he looked from his pug’s perspective, he started musing on distortion. “Kai brought this collection to life,” he tells British Vogue post-show, pleased – if slightly bemused – by the amount his trousers have, for want of a better word, blown up.

The collection was not just comprised of memeable pants. Harikrishnan split the show into three sections – “craft, latex and tailoring” – with the concept of “familiarity versus unfamiliarity” at the heart of the edit. “People connect to the inflatable trousers because they are unfamiliar,” he explains of the striped catwalk creations he paired with boxy blazers. “We see the same things again and again through social media, so I wanted to invite them to question why this is by creating a new ‘unfamiliar’ visual.”

The 3D trousers started life in a clay model. Thirty individual panels made from three metres of Supatex were then stuck together by hand, leaving room for a seven millimetre-wide inflation valve at the bottom. Harikrishnan, who blew up his own trial pairs but used a pump for the show, maintains the wide leg-styles are easy to slide into, and require a mere two minutes of deflation time before hopping out of them afterwards. Once fully pumped up, “It feels like you’re floating,” he smiles.

“I have no intention to sell them,” says Harikrishnan, when asked about the commercial viability of the designs. Costume departments have, unsurprisingly, come knocking, and he has two music videos lined up to feature them. His main focus is the craft element of the collection, which saw Harikrishnan collaborate with a 200 year old artisan community in Channapatna, India. During his 30-day stay at the UNESCO site, he trained two women to adapt their woodturning skills to make linked beading for his ready-to-wear. To realise his vests and shorts, micro wooden beads were coated and coloured with beeswax and natural lacquer and fused together during a painstaking process.

“Exposing centuries-old craft and giving it a new direction is more rewarding than making inflatables for me,” says Harikrishnan. He hopes that after the publicity around his show has ahem deflated, he will return to India and work on creating more “wearables”, including bags, from the beads, which he will then sell.