HARRI: the designer stretching menswear boundaries with inflatable latex sculpture

To celebrate our first birthday, woo has curated a list of our ones. The people in our wooniverse who are redefining fashion, music, clubs, culture and much more.

When Sam Smith stepped out at the BRITs in high-gloss, inflatable latex trousers and a matching top, ballooning out from the singer’s frame in villainous arcs, it was an instant red carpet fashion classic. The question on everyone’s lips? Which designer did we have to thank for this headline-grabbing get-up? The answer was HARRI (real name Harikrishnan Keezhathil Surendran Pillai): a Kerala-born creative who’d shown his London College of Fashion graduate collection only three years prior.

And while his voluminous designs are an inevitable social media hit, he doesn’t seem the least bit interested in creating for the attention economy. Speaking over the phone, he reveals that his method and inspirations are somewhat more lofty than that. Specifically, he approaches his garments as wearable pieces of art: referring to himself as a sculptor trained in fashion design, whose medium just so happens to be latex.

This, of course, isn’t exactly shocking. We can see the artist’s hand in the malleable plasticity of his best-known pieces (most of which are not exactly created for every day wear) and a sculptor’s passion for experimenting with the dimensions of the body, too. After all, the HARRI label is synonymous with garments which emphasise and exaggerate muscles through inflatable flourishes and which stick to the skin with clingy latex. This obsession with form, he admits, has unconventional creative roots – and can be traced back to his former life as a body builder.

But with designs that show under the menswear banner, the creative’s inventive approach is all the more radical than his origin story. Concerned with not just how the body looks but how it moves, his wearable sculptures are a nod towards greater freedom of physical expression, introducing a much-needed sense of lightness and play to counteract the guarded, stiff body language that men are all too often socialised to adopt.

I would describe myself as a fashion designer and also a sculptor. Yes, I am trained in fashion design, but I'm passionate about sculptures and sculpting. My medium at the moment is latex and I make latex, inflatable sculptures.

I would describe it the same way!

I didn't have any choice at that point of time in my life. I come from India and this was like 2011, 2012. At that point, everybody was either a doctor or doing a masters in business. I didn’t like any of those things. But fashion wasn't even my first career. I was a bodybuilder before this for five years, and then I quit that to become a fashion designer.

I’m working on my next collection, which I'm excited about. The deadline is in June and then my show will be in September. So that's what I'm doing at the moment.

I would like to see more people taking risks to do everything possible to achieve what they want to achieve. There needs to be more risk-taking rather than an ocean of rationality.

What I do is about taking a lot of risks, especially the career I am in within fashion design. It’s a very fast-paced industry and all these luxury brands set the pace for the industry. I'm a person who works in very different way, I do make clothes but at the same time I have a passion for sculpting and my biggest challenge is bringing these two worlds together.