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Lucas Nascimento
Hot Street Graffiti of Brazil Explodes over London Fashion


São Paulo's Lucas Nascimento is one of the hottest new talents on the London Fashion scene. His inovative use of new techniques pushes the boundaries of modern knitwear creating amazing results. Au Magazine interviewed Lucas’ creative director Nora Wong to find out more about the processes this exciting fashion label.

Where do you and Lucas get inspiration for your designs from?

Inspiration can come from anywhere on a daily basis when you live in a city as diverse as London! We travel a lot so the different landscapes, textures, people all feed into the designs in some way.


How to you translate this inspiration to artworks?

The Autumn/Winter 2012 has some reference to skateboarding culture which is a big thing in Brazil, where Lucas grew up. We were looking at a lot of graffiti and this subculture of tagging which ended up being translated into 3-colour jacquards, using combinations of all the yarns from the collection to create something beautifully textural and not too literal.

What processes do you use to create your artworks?

The knitting technique is called jacquard. It's a lot of trialling yarn combinations, colour combinations and tensions until you are happy with the final fabric. The graffiti dresses in the AW12 collection were also all very engineered - ie the artwork matches across the seams of the panels of the dress. It is a time consuming thing because you have to calculate and program, stitch for stitch, the artwork to match each pattern piece. Very mathematical!

How important are your artworks to your collections?

I think they are very important and often pull the different directions of the collection together.
For instance in the AW12 collection, the graffiti jacquards combined all yarns from the collection in one piece so they were visually very important to hold the collection together.

How do you usually decide on your colour ways?

Lucas loves colour! He loves to experiment with colour combinations and it is never something he is afraid to use. He is also very intuitive so he generally knows what he wants from the beginning.