Bentley Graham, a second-year student on the Fashion Design BA Honours course at the University of Westminster, was recently selected to take part in a new advertising campaign with Italian sportswear brand C.P. Company for Spring/Summer 2022.
The campaign features five people for whom wearing, buying, selling and studying C.P. Company clothing has intersected experiences of cultural interest.
Bentley became interested in C.P. Company after conducting research through the Westminster Menswear Archive (WMA) as part of his studies at the University. The archive was founded in 2017 to establish and maintain a collection of garments and related artefacts to encourage and develop the study of menswear design from a technical and functional point of view; to advance the general knowledge of menswear as a design discipline, and to serve as a resource tool to inform contemporary menswear design. The archive contains a wide range of garments by C.P. Company, dating from the 1970s to 2021.
He also assisted with the Westminster Menswear Archive exhibition ‘C.P. Library’, which was held in conjunction with the C.P. Company’s 50th anniversary exhibition in Darwen, Lancashire, in November 2021. During the exhibition, Bentley met the team from C.P. Company and was invited to fly to Milan to be photographed for their latest campaign.
For his portraits for the SS2022 campaign, Bentley chose to wear C.P. Company’s latest iteration of the ‘Tracery’ series of printed outerwear, which he paired with trousers that he sewed and printed himself using the cyanotype process, a photographic printing process which produces a cyan-blue light. He has grown confident using this technique through studying C.P. Company’s ‘lesson’ about including the mistake or unknown consequence into the manufacturing process.
Talking to C.P. Company about his use of the WMA to continue to educate himself throughout his studies, Bentley said: “In order to visit the archive you have to book certain items, but when you get there, one of the most interesting things to do is look at all the things left out by people who visited before you.
“You will start touching or having a look at things left out and suddenly Danielle Sprecher (MWA Curator) or Andrew Groves (MWA Director) come up to you and tell you a million things about the piece. And that’s how I came to really getting into C.P. Company, by looking at pieces by the brand that older students had requested.”
Professor Andrew Groves, Professor of Fashion Design and Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive, said: “The Westminster Menswear Archive was purposefully designed to bring students and industry together, and this is one of the more visible examples of that happening. The fact that both C.P. Company and Bentley have been able to use the archive means that we are able to introduce them to each other and share their passion for design. The archive has a long relationship with the C.P. Company, and their recent 50th Anniversary exhibition in Milan this year featured extremely rare items from our collection.”
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