Fashion Heavyweights Natacha Ramsay-Levi and Bianca Saunders Join New Luxury Craft Collective

Fashion designers have often moonlit as multidisciplinary artists. Rick Owens has been making furniture since 2007, Helmut Lang turned his hand to sculpture soon after departing his namesake brand in 2005, and just last year, British designer Henry Holland made the pivot from fashion to ceramics. Now, AT.KOLLEKTIVE, a new creative exchange, invites onlookers to rethink the relationship between designer, object and consumer, giving a select number of designers the opportunity to work with high-grade ECCO leather to create nine products ranging from garments, shoes and handbags to furniture and light installations.

Launching last month during Paris Fashion Week Menswear, AT.KOLLEKTIVE invites leading creative minds to rethink contemporary design from their respective fields. For AT.KOLLEKTIVE's stellar first chapter, fashion designers Natacha Ramsay-Levi (formerly Chloé creative director), Bianca Saunders and Kostas Murkudis (who began his career assisting Helmut Lang), join accessories designer Isaac Reina and architect Bernard Dubois to form their creative exchange.

With innovation and mindful design at the project's core, AT.KOLLEKTIVE is underpinned by ECCO leather, which the participating designers are invited to reinterpret as they see fit, resulting in unique, collector's items made to last. Promoting a considered and mindful process of design, creatives are invited to focus on one material, without the pressure of the large collections associated with the harmful, over-productive fashion cycle. Furthermore, Ramsay-Levi, Saunders, Murkudis, Reina and Dubois will be invited to contribute to next season's iteration of the project to explore their burgeoning ideas some more.

'ECCO Leather is about innovation and invention. With AT.KOLLEKTIVE, we wanted to invite designers to enjoy the process of learning, of experimentation, and to create a collection in a pace and environment that was not pressured or didactic; an environment that was about dialogue and investigation, rather than immediacy or fixed results...', said Panos Mytaros, CEO, ECCO Group, in a statement.

Parisian native Ramsay-Levi, who previously helmed luxury house Chloé, together with ANDAM prize-winner Saunders, both used the opportunity to explore furniture for the first time. At the project's launch, Saunders told SHOWstudio that AT.KOLLEKTIVE has broadened the horizon for her blossoming menswear label, giving her the opportunity to work with leather and to expand into accessories, whilst applying her knack for sculptural, twisted silhouettes into bags, slip-on shoes and coats.

Elsewhere, designer Reina is well versed in the world of leather, having previously worked at Hermès. For the project, he created bags and shoes which draw on his love of Modernism and background in architecture. Murkudis chose to play on the idea of paper envelopes and bags, with leather bags retaining neat folded lines through bonding methods. E/Research presented a series of special objects from the ECCO Ateliers.

First shown in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the collections will travel to a forthcoming gallery space-cum-retail-hub in Copenhagen, an urban hub for sustainable design.