the sculptors reimagining fashion displays

In a warehouse studio in Dalston, east London, designer Isabel Gibson peers towards a computer monitor displaying a rendering of a 20-metre-tall sculpture bound for Coachella music and arts festival. Across the room, an assistant affixes fabric ribbons to the skeletal spokes of a device that was once an umbrella; now it’s a flowerlike kinetic sculpture set to appear in the Paris Fashion Week show of emerging brand, zomer. 

More of those umbrellas share shelf space with maquettes of past projects — including a miniature of “Power Plant”, the silver Christmas installation created for the Victoria and Albert Museum last winter. The model is pieced together from kebab skewers and toothpicks wrapped in metallic tape. “There’s only so much you can visualise from a sketch,” says Helen Chesner, Gibson’s creative partner. “Eventually you have to get the cocktail sticks out.”

You know when you’re a kid and you see something for the first time, and it’s really exciting and surprising? We’re trying to recreate that innate joy

Over the past several years, Gibson and Chesner — working as Isabel + Helen — have quietly built up a design practice predicated on bringing movement to inanimate items. In their hands, found objects become a functional swan boat for Burberry. Gold modelling balloons inflate around wrists and fingers to mimic the modernist whorls of Charlotte Chesnais’s jewellery. Tessellated jackets and trousers by Craig Green whoosh across a surface and disappear through apertures.

“They’re always open to experimentation, pushing ideas to their limits,” says Green, a frequent collaborator. “It is that willingness to explore and expand concepts that makes working with them so inspiring.”

They call it kinetic sculpture, but viewing an Isabel + Helen creation can feel more like watching a sleight-of-hand artist at work. “There’s often a reveal, which adds a magic-trick element,” Chesner says. Gibson nods. “It’s about the contrast between the industrial and the everyday, and then making that beautiful and surprising.”

The Isabel + Helen toolkit includes fans, drills (“to make things spin really fast”), umbrellas, hoovers and lengths of elastic (“handy for creating a bouncing motion”). They say they appeal to fashion brands, including Moncler, Bottega Veneta and Nike, because they offer a new approach to displaying clothes in an industry where items are normally depicted as flat product shots or on models. Plus, there’s the emotion their work elicits. 

“You know when you’re a kid and you see something for the first time, and it’s really exciting and surprising?” Gibson asks. “We’re trying to recreate that innate joy and childlike delight through the element of surprise.”

In June, when models in Cartier’s high jewellery show walked through Vienna’s Belvedere Palace Gardens wearing Isabel + Helen’s “Power Suits” — complex arrangements of pinwheels and turbines worn on backpack-like harnesses — the effect was magnetic. “A lot of people were drawn to them and wanted to touch them, which is actually quite dangerous,” Chesner says.

Chesner, 34, and Gibson, 35, met on a graphic design and visual communication course at Chelsea College of Art. After graduating, Chesner assisted set designer Robert Storey (who designed the Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2023) and Gibson went to work for Hotel Creative, specialising in window displays for retailers. On the side, they designed windows for Selfridges and installations for festivals, such as the giant binoculars they set up on either side of the Secret Garden Party site. “So you’d look in and maybe make a friend across the festival,” Chesner says. 

Their real breakthrough came via a commission to create the spring/summer 2018 windows for Hermès’s UK stores, guided by the theme “Play”. In the main set-up, two ping-pong ball shooters fired balls back and forth through a hoop created by the top handle of a handbag. Printed silk scarves attached to windscreen wipers opened and closed like sails. Twilly scarves fluttered on a hair dryer, and a shoe revolved atop a microwave turntable. Passers-by stopped and smiled.

It was “a perfect brief for us”, Chesner says. “Our work is all inspired by play. Everything we do links back to nostalgia and being a child.” Playground equipment (like the wheeled suitcases rolling up and down a see-saw in a project for Rimowa) and classic toys are constant references. The clicky-clacky movement of a Jacob’s Ladder — a Victorian toy consisting of slats of wood linked by string or ribbon — fed into the design of a folding machine for Craig Green. In it, technicians manually move cardboard panels to fold chore jackets.

It’s important to them that viewers can see the mechanics behind the magic. “We want everything to feel real, because then people get so much more satisfaction out of it,” Gibson says.

There’s a similar rhythm in the film Chesner and Gibson created for Marfa Stance’s first London Fashion Week presentation. The 90-second video showcases the brand’s reversible, modular outerwear, with lab-coated crew members pushing tables of coats, collars, quilted liners and other buildable elements across a floor painted in a grid pattern. Everyone involved was assigned starting and ending grid coordinates, the better to avoid collisions. “Almost like Battleship,” Chesner says, invoking another game. The trickiest part was turning the jackets inside out. Chesner wanted to evoke the satisfying snap of a duvet cover on a freshly made bed. The result, after a dozen or so takes, is a mesmerising, flipbook-like short film.

“They’re approaching the collection from such a different, artistic point of view,” says brand founder Georgia Dant. “To see the film come together like this really elevates the brand and feels super-unique. It’s a pinch-me moment.”

Between commissions, Chesner and Gibson experiment and tinker in their studio. They’d love to take on the challenge of designing for theatre, dance or a concert tour.

Sparks of new ideas fly from all directions — including from Gibson’s one-year-old twins’ toys. “Everything feeds into our work. Sometimes without us even realising it,” she says. “Even seeing them opening and shutting the flaps on a cardboard box the other day, I thought, ‘What if every layer was a different colour and it just kept opening?’”

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