So in this article, I hope to explain my thought processes behind putting a new collection together and how those ideas germinate, using my new Quilted Latex Concept collection as illustration.

Two years ago I decided to set myself the challenge of taking latex into new territory. Having worked with latex for more than 35 years I needed a new direction!

Given that one of EctoMorph’s signature styles is stitched latex, I wondered if it was possible to quilt latex, and began by trying small areas of quilting on waistcoats for men.

My initial vision saw quilting as male territory. My Menswear range had been neglected for a long time and needed a fresh look so that was where the experiments first occurred.

Small areas of quilting incorporated into the overall design seemed to work and the public response was good, so I developed it further into a new Biker Jacket with quilted sleeves and yoke.

One customer then requested a completely quilted jacket, which I initially thought would be impossible. But I took it onboard and the resulting jacket was great. Latex actually seemed to lend itself to being quilted.

It is, I suppose, a tried and tested arena in high street fashion. Quilting is familiar in leather and now, like denim, it has become a staple style for outerwear like nylon coats and jackets. So why not latex?

‘In a fashion magazine I found amazing shapes in quilted silk. They ignited my own sartorial flare for shape, and so my journey began to transfer these ideas into latex womenswear’

Within fashion for the past two years there has been a distinct trend for exaggerated shapes and oversized garments, and in a fashion magazine I came across amazing shapes in quilted silk designed by Pierpaolo Piccioli for Moncler.

There were huge, padded, ground-length duvet coats and maxi A-line dresses that made the models look like a cross between Renaissance Madonnas and nuns.

They ignited my own sartorial flare for shape, and so my journey began to transfer these ideas into latex womenswear. This was my starting point for a new collection for women that would be based on block shapes and block colour.

The trend for colour blocking has been seen for a long time in fashion and I decided to use this idea of not breaking up the look with distracting contrast colour, but using just one colour per outfit.

Steering clear of my failsafe black and white and venturing into new territory, working particularly with bright colours, was a decision I made at the suggestion of photographer Aidan McCarthy.

He would be photographing the collection, and proposed that I work with a bright colour palette and colours I really dislike, such as tangerine and acid green.

It took me out of my comfort zone. My little black dresses were my staple, default position for every collection. It was the same position I’d taken with the menswear, so to work now with colours i had always avoided was a real challenge!

By the time I had made the first two Quilted Concept outfits from these colours, I loved them both equally. The look was completely fresh and new for latex while continuing the EctoMorph trademark of stitched rubber.

At a lecture on fashion I recently attended at the ICA, speaker Kaat Debo mentioned the Japanese notion of Ma which denotes the space or gap between the body and the garments that clothe it.

Ma gives the wearer a natural freedom. I became very interested in this concept and thought it could apply to latex, especially in the way I was about to use it, creating shapes that touched the body in some areas but also allowed space between the body and the garment.

It was a complete departure from the tight-fitting, constricting qualities always associated with latex clothing. But it still embodied the fetish elements of enclosure and shape.

For a long time, fashion had worked according to the concept of shifting the erogenous zone from one area of the body to another.

One season would focus on the breasts, with décollete styles exposing a woman’s cleavage, while for another, the waist would become the focus, expressed through corseted or tightly-waisted garments. This provided a dependable framework for collections.

In the 1980s, Japanese fashion designers altered the prevailing fashion aesthetic of symmetry, balance and perfection by concealing the body beneath many layers and draped styles.

‘In the 1980s, the Japanese designers’ notion of layering clothes and cutting shapes from rectangles that fitted together like a jigsaw was a new and different way of looking at fashion’

Most of the clothes presented by the Japanese designers were black, and this became the fashion uniform. In addition, the notion of layering clothes and cutting shapes from rectangles that were fitted together like a jigsaw was a new and different way of looking at fashion.

They seemed to be deconstructing fashion. These ideas were particularly found in the collections of Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons and Martin Margiela, whose radical new approach overturned the construction of garments.

New shapes evolved for the body but still had some historical reference to traditional garments like the kimono.

I took the kimono idea on as reference point for this new collection. The first female shape for this concept collection I produced was the tangerine two-piece with a geisha-style kimono, butterfly-sleeve jacket and petal-hemmed skirt.

Aidan had also suggested I look at insects as inspiration for this new collection and it was the shapes of their wings, beetles’ armour-like bodies, and beehives that became the interconnecting threads and ideas for the Ectomorph Quilted Concept collection.

As a designer you also find that features from previous collections carry through to the current collection and there is an overlap that links them up.