Miranda Keyes for Flik Hall

Flik Hall has collaborated with Miranda Keyes to create an enticing accessories collection to compliment her ready-to-wear collection. Miranda Keyes is a young designer based in Glasgow that creates wearable art from sea creatures and botanical specimens. Flik Hall’s SS12 collection was inspired by obscure close up imagery of octopi. The collection embodies prints of abstracted structural forms of octopi in fleshy tones that twist over leather, emblazoned with eyelets to represent the octopi’s suckers. Miranda’s unique choice of materials caught Flik’s attention and they began designing a visceral accessories collection made from real octopus.

The collection of pieces includes a bra made entirely from tentacles; a crown that, cast under resin, is restored to the beauty that the octopi hold in the water. This ornate material becomes ambiguously enticing when preserved in a solid state as part of rings and chokers, amongst other intricate pieces. Letting both the form of the tentacles and the curve of the body dictate the end result, these pieces ally themselves seamlessly with the body.

These pieces draw on intricate and naturally occurring forms; ordered formation of tentacles recast into wearable art challenging, by their composition the established conventions of bodily adornment.