Mark Fast completed a BA and MA at Central St Martins and has since created knitwear for Bora Aksu over three seasons.
He designs by hand on a domestic knitting machine, using innovative stitches he has devised himself and blending Lycra with viscose, angora or wool. He most recently hit the headlines for using larger models to showcase his body hugging designs.
How are your designs manufactured?
For my main collection I design in my studio in London by hand. For production of that collection I work with a few groups of home knitters in different areas of Europe to produce the panels and all the pieces come back to get hand finished in my studio. Faster by Mark Fast is produced at a knitwear atelier in Italy.
Are there limitations to what is possible with knitwear?
There are limitations because there are only certain kinds of yarn you can use on certain machines. When there are limitations to a look that I want to create with knitwear, I try to find a way around it by using a different yarn or a different tension.
What do you see as the next development in knitwear?
I feel that knitwear will become domesticated once again. I think people will see that they can produce their own ideas at home and have fun, especially the younger audiences.
Knitwear dresses from Mark Fast Spring/Summer 2010 collection
I remember seeing some of the Galliano stuff that he did for Dior last year in person in Paris and it’s absolutely amazing. It’s really one of the most beautiful objects, iridescent objects that I have seen in a long time. But if you actually don’t look at fashion from that perspective, not just so much about the type of things that you create, but you look at fashion as more as an approach to design rather than exactly what it is that you design, then you can actually take a lot of things from the fashion world and you can incorporate them into whether it’s product design, interaction design or space or environments or whatever it is. And I think that that’s the kind of the really exciting part for me about fashion. And I still don’t dare to try to design clothes but I do believe that I’m producing now some of this fashion attitude towards the kind of things that I design Ignacio Germade
Listen to Ignacio Germade, Design Director of Consumer Experience Design at Motorola talk with Sarah Maynard, designer, Vicky Richardson, Editor of Blueprint magazine, and Tom Savigar from Future Laboratory about the influence of fashion on wider design practice. Listen to the podcast