A bodice, for Croydon

Gary Pike and Linda Moss are getting married in Croydon in June: the register office at eleven, then the rugby club, with a hot buffet and a pay bar. They've asked Alexander McQueen to do the invitations.

That's the whole joke, and we wanted to play it completely straight. McQueen was a Londoner, a taxi driver's son who grew up in Stratford in East London and learned to cut cloth on Savile Row. We liked imagining him taking an ordinary couple's commission as seriously as a show: the rugby club, the sausage rolls, the egg-and-cress triangles, the pints of bitter, and a bride in black feathers. It's the British wedding everyone has been to, given the most serious invitation anyone has ever received.

Wanted: Something funny that's still genuinely beautiful.

Constraint: If the invitation looks like a costume, the joke dies. The comedy has to come from the gap between the object and the occasion.

We chose: We designed it as if it were going down a runway, and let the words do the joking: Croydon Register Office, a hot buffet, a pay bar, and "kindly reply to Linda's mum".

Wanted: Something that says McQueen before you read a word.

Constraint: A laced closure has to open and close without tearing, and the doors have to meet cleanly in the middle.

We chose: A gatefold with two 2.5-inch doors, each with five black metal eyelets set just in from the edge, laced shut with oxblood silk ribbon like the back of a corset. You have to unlace it to read it.

Wanted: The blackest black we could find, so the foil does all the talking.

Constraint: A printed or coated black shows a pale core at the cut edge and scuffs where the ribbon rubs, and eyelets need a thick board to hold.

We chose: Fedrigoni Sirio Ultra Black at 680 g/m², dyed right through. It's one sheet, thick enough to take eyelets without bonding two boards together.

Wanted: A nod to the moths of VOSS, his Spring/Summer 2001 show.

Constraint: Black foil on black board disappears under soft light, and a plain gloss black would read as a smudge.

We chose: L6-003A Black Holographic Gemstone foil: mirror black that throws shards of rainbow when the light catches it. The moth spans both doors and the lacing runs down its spine, so it's only whole when the invitation is laced shut.

Wanted: The language of the cutting room. McQueen learned his trade on Savile Row, as a coat-making apprentice at Anderson & Sheppard and then a pattern cutter at Gieves & Hawkes.

Constraint: Fine dashed lines and small labels can fill in or break up when they're foiled onto a dark, toothy board.

We chose: Matte white pigment foil (P92), with every line at least 0.75 mm and dashes long enough to hold: seam allowances, notches, grain arrows, "CENTRE FRONT" and "CUT 1 · LEFT" on the outside, and a bodice pattern piece marked "CUT 2 IN SILK" inside.

Wanted: A crisp, solid white on black.

Constraint: White ink on a black sheet prints grey and needs several hits to look white.

We chose: Foil only. A white pigment foil lays down a dense, opaque white in a single pass, and every word on the piece is stamped.

Wanted: One colour besides black and white.

Constraint: A bright red would look like a novelty, and on a black edge any paint goes darker.

We chose: PANTONE 7421 C, a deep oxblood, on the painted edges and matched in the silk ribbon. On the black board it reads like dried roses.

The moth. McQueen's Spring/Summer 2001 show, VOSS, ended with a glass box breaking open to release hundreds of moths. Ours is stamped in black holographic foil, so it's almost invisible until it catches the light.

The corset and the ribbon. Corsetry runs right through his shows; the corsetier Mr Pearl even walked in The Birds (Spring/Summer 1995). We turned the invitation into a bodice that you unlace to read, and chose the ribbon in the same oxblood as the edges.

The stitching and the pattern marks. The dashed lines, notches, grain arrows and "CENTRE FRONT" come straight off a pattern-cutting table. McQueen trained on Savile Row, and we wanted the invitation to look as if it had been drafted before it was printed.

The feathers. Feathers came back again and again in his collections, so the bride wears them, at the rugby club, next to the fruit machine.

The type. The invitation is set in a high-contrast Bodoni, the kind of serif you see on fashion magazine covers, and the pattern marks are in a typewriter face, like the labels on paper patterns.

The rugby club, the buffet and the bitter. That's Gary and Linda's part, and it's what makes the whole thing funny.

VOSS at the V&A's Museum of Savage Beauty → →

We shot it like a cold, symmetrical 1970s film: one-point perspective, a wide lens, fluorescent strip lights and very slow push-ins. That framing makes an empty function room look monumental, which is exactly the joke. The score is a solemn baroque sarabande playing over sausage rolls.

The stills borrow the hard flash, lacquered reds and cropped legs of 1970s fashion editorials.

Everything started flat. We built the artwork on photographs of the real paper and our real foil chips, set the type in real fonts, and only then built the scenes around it. Sets, people and motion are AI-assisted; the paper, foils and finishes are things we make every week.

This one's an exploration, but every part of it is real: black-through papers, black holographic and white foils, eyelets and hand lacing, painted edges. Bring us your Gary and Linda.

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