Benjamin Benmoyal is a French-Israeli fashion designer graduated from Central Saint Martin. Optimistic about the future, the designer hand-weaves his fabrics made from recycled VHS tapes to tell us a better history for the future.
Composed of wide-legged trousers, huge collars in geometric shapes and layering of extravagance, the collection inspires a colorful future regardless of what we’ve been through.
After a compulsory one-year experience in military service when he was still a high school student, the designer felt the urge to build something that could make him feel less pessimistic about our reality. Years later, around this time, as a fashion student, he gave life to It Was Better Tomorrow, a creative response on how to feel better after such an experience.
For this project, Benjamin Benmojal focused his creation on a vision of the future inspired by the projected image of life that people had during the late 1960s, adopting the design and architectural style of that era. According to him, that period, compared to the present day, seemed to be more optimistic. It seems like we tend to foresee the future as a catastrophe or else it won’t exist.
The brutalist shapes of 1960s architecture combined with hand-woven fabrics made of discarded materials, such as video and cassette tapes make his collection unique; an utopian vision of fashion involving a range of structural pieces patterned with vibrant colors to recreate the past, but a better one, where the choice of material reveals the key message. In the digital era, companies and individuals want to get rid of tapes, they believe them useless, but there is a sentimental value there, a nostalgic memory of childhood times, a lost naivety and the designer explores it beautifully with hulking silhouettes.
Benjamin Benmoyal inspires us with the It Was Better Tomorrow fashion collection, not only for the technique used, for the upcycling an old fashioned memory, but also for the message it conveys: we can always give a new meaning to the past by adding the colors of a hopeful future.
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