‘Fairy-God, Fashion-Mother’is a collection of collage-drawings created by Mumbai – born and London – based artist Hormazd Narielwalla (b. 1979). Narielwalla  was inspired by the famous fashion lover Diane Pernet. The drawings are made-up of various pieces, generated from different sources but all have a common thread – they are all made up of paper. Narielwalla used either authentic paper garments or images of paper dresses from the RRRIPP!! Collection, pattern drafts extracted from a Victorian pattern-cutting book (London College of Fashion archive) and discarded Savile Row patterns of men who are long dead.

”I was still researching for my PhD at the University of Arts, London when Vassilis [Zidianakis] contacted me to collaborate. …. I was beginning an arts practice using tailoring and sewing paper patterns, interpreted into figurative and abstract collages…There was a similarity between paper sewing patterns and the dresses. This was a very interesting proposition for me to respond to his archive by using the paper dresses to make unique collages in combination with historical patterns that I sourced…

 Vassilis and I were introduced by Diane Pernet and we both felt that she would make a wonderful muse in my work. Also Diane is always dresses in Black, and she herself said that this is the only time anyone can see her in colour. The works used a combination of actual paper dresses and cut outs from the exhibition catalogue.”

Excerpt from a written interview to M. Pichou on the occasion of the article
“The ATOPOS RIPPING Project: a “new” life for dress objects ?” (COSTUME, volume 54, issue 2, 2020)