Deep Breath - Eden Loweth x Maggi Hambling

The cartoons of the Raphael Gallery have looked on for hundreds of years, but now hundreds of fresh eyes are waiting for the bare feet of thirty models to begin to move across cold marble. The walls breathe with the energised pulses of Steve Reich’s ‘Music for 18 Musicians’, the echo of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Not I’ dissipating in the vast space. This gallery is not just a catwalk, where thirty figures from across the arts have become gracious models, but the expanse of an enduring artistic career. In this seminal collaboration between designer Eden Loweth and artist Maggi Hambling, canvases and bodies become indistinguishable, paint and cloth unite, the rebellious act of creation strides down the runway – two artistic forces as one. In 2025, for the first time in its twenty-five-year run, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Fashion In Motion experience is a collaboration. Art and fashion. Through the lens of Loweth as a fashion designer, Hambling’s art has been studied, understood and reimagined in an innovate, bold and unique collection that shall make its first and last appearance over four shows on January 31. For one day, Loweth shall inhabit Hambling’s work in a visual and textual reinterpretation of the ever-relevant moods and emotions of her diverse oeuvre. Seminal, fleeting, archival, emotional, “Deep Breath” is an offering to Fashion In Motion unlike any other. 

Spiegl Press, 2025
Hardcover
240 x 175mm