Sinead Gorey's A/W 20 Film 'Artefact' Is An Exercise In Rave Nostalgia

by Hetty Mahlich on 18 June 2020

Creative duo Clodie Worboys and Charlie Tronchot's film explores the optical illusions of a psychedelic rave.

Creative duo Clodie Worboys and Charlie Tronchot's film explores the optical illusions of a psychedelic rave.

A short film by creative duo Clodie Worboys and Charlie Tronchot captures the London-based designer Sinead Gorey's A/W 20 collection, with psychedelic rave culture at its core. Shot predominantly on an iPhone, Artefact is a nostalgic feast for the soul.

The Sinead Gorey A/W 20 collection is inspired by psychedelic rave décor and string art, and explores the optical illusions created by the different substances one might find at said rave. Made up of cut-out Lycra panelled boob tube dresses, unitards and mesh tops with rhinestone and chain trims, which enhance and skew the female body, the clothes play with ideas of movement and question how we perceive reality. Building on the S/S 20 collection, which drew upon the designer's experience growing up in the London squat raving scene, now we're seeing Gorey exploring the visual effects of that scene more intensely. There's definitely a nostalgia for an era of rave culture which is fast diminishing, and Worboy and Tronchot's film elevates Gorey's clothes, which in turn create a culture of their own.

'The film puts my party girl muse in the middle of this concept I have created, glitching in and out of consciousness, laser lights beaming on her face, wind creating movement on different fabric textures with an overall feeling of nostalgia' Gorey summarises. They're bright, colourful and tactile clothes which demand our engagement, with Artefact bringing the viewer right up close. The film is centred around distortion, with the camera lens spanning up and down the models, including songstress Kate Stewart. 'We wanted to use a fisheye lens to play with strong visual distortions and give a voyeuristic and intrusive look at the collection' Tronchot explains. It's all very nostalgic, but certainly not predictable.

Having previously collaborated with Gorey on a virtual rave experience for her S/S 20 presentation, Worboys, the founder of creative incubator SENSERGY, teamed up with photographer and creative director Tronchot on Artefact. The pair, who met whilst interning at SHOWstudio, were apprehensive of how they would edit the film when lockdown hit, having luckily already got all the footage they needed. However, they quickly found that they thrived under the new, limited conditions. 'Being restricted made me more creative than ever, and allowed us to channel our creativity to work together as a team (virtually), and to produce something which uplifted all of our spirits' explains Worboys.

The sense of something glitching, not being quite as it was intended, underlies both Gorey's collection and the film. 'The title Artefact came from a transmission error that happened while I was exporting one of the edits, producing by accident these very interesting glitches on the videos. We then decided to take some of the parts and add them to the final version' Tronchot tells me. Her boyfriend, Peter Pixzel, the London-based DJ and music producer, created the soundtrack, which slows down techno sounds into a pop-music tempo, again questioning what we think we already know, whilst adding to this immersive new reality.

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