Westminster Menswear Archive presents Aitor Throup’s ULTRA VEIL at Ambika P3

Presented by the Westminster Menswear Archive and supported by Fred Perry, the exhibition brings together entirely new sculptural work from Throup’s developing AitorultrA practice alongside examples of his design process and work in development.

Throup is an artist, designer and creative director best known for his menswear label New Object Research. Born in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires before moving to Burnley in 1992, Throup’s work is committed to imagining and creating new ways of telling stories through object design and the creation and production of related materials.

ULTRA VEIL explores the relationship between experimentation, process and outcome. Rather than presenting a retrospective of completed work, the exhibition captures Throup’s practice at a point when a number of ideas and processes are still developing towards future outcomes.

Some of this work will subsequently inform products for AitorultrA as well as collaborations with brands including Fred Perry, Umbro and Maharishi, offering visitors an unusual opportunity to encounter design before its final commercial or material form is known.

The exhibition forms part of the Westminster Menswear Archive’s wider research into how archives can operate as active infrastructures for contemporary design rather than solely as repositories of the past. The WMA increasingly works alongside designers and organisations while new work is being created, researching how design knowledge is generated, transferred, documented and preserved.

The exhibition will also provide the setting for a programme of public conversations, professional research sessions and student activities examining design process, creative collaboration, prospective collecting and object-based learning.

ULTRA VEIL continues the Westminster Menswear Archive’s programme of exhibition-led research at Ambika P3, following projects including Invisible Men and Umbro 100. It will run between 30 October – 8 November and will be open daily from 11am-7pm.

Professor Andrew Groves, Director of the WMA and Professor of Menswear Systems at the University of Westminster, said: “Archives usually encounter design retrospectively, once an object has been produced and its significance is already beginning to be understood. ULTRA VEIL gives us the opportunity to do something quite different: to encounter and document design while it is still happening.

“What makes this particularly interesting for the Westminster Menswear Archive is that we can follow these processes forward. Some will become products, some will move through collaborations with other organisations and some may remain experimental. It allows us to ask what should be understood and preserved before we know what will ultimately prove significant.”

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