THE AVIARY: Harris Reed SS26 | A Collaboration with Fromental

Our first collaboration with Harris Reed, Shadow Dance (February 2024), was about repurposing heritage. We reinterpreted our Chinoiserie naturescapes as couture silks, showing that what once dressed interiors could delight just as convincingly on the body. It was a celebration of transformation—taking something rooted in history and giving it new life on the runway.

This chapter, Reed says, has been "like the most iconic playdate" — less about reinterpretation and more about conception: new ideas, new techniques, and a renewed perspective.

For us, pattern is never static; it performs. In The Aviary, Harris’s vision of flight—at once liberating and theatrical—found its counterpart in our craft.

Together, we explored techniques that heighten this sense of contradiction: devoré velvet that reveals and conceals, chenille embroidery adding depth and tactility, Italian velvets painted in bruised, shifting tones, and a 19th-century Nottingham lace pattern redrawn as a panoramic landscape. Each process became part of the performance, a play of opacity and transparency, weight and lightness.

Harris’s personal alignment with fluidity—movement, identity, boundaries dissolving—took form through sweeping birdlike motifs, their silhouettes echoing both the confinement of cages and the liberation of wings in motion. 

Scale has often underpinned our designs, and with Harris’s appetite for drama, tiger print and tortoiseshell blown up across layered fabrics, adopted their own choreography. These fabrics seemed to move before the models even stepped onto the runway.

If Shadow Dance was about putting our craft on a new stage, The Aviary is about expanding the stage itself. Techniques usually reserved for interiors—gold-leaf silk grounds, hand-embroidered landscapes, bruised velvet painted by hand—were pushed into fashion. The collaboration isn’t about surface decoration; it’s about testing the limits of technique without compromising its integrity.

The devoré velvet is a perfect example. Lizzie had waited thirty years for the right context to use a process that mimics 19th-century French cut velvet. Paired with Harris’s colour direction and an unapologetic tiger motif, the result feels both historical and entirely contemporary.