Print isn't dead. In fashion terms, digital has only served to
provide it with a host of new incarnations. While the ancient art
of applying colour patterns to fabric is still practised with
varying degrees of hand-crafting in fancy collections everywhere,
Photoshop now lets people devise entirely new kinds of prints, and
digital printing lets them apply those prints to clothing almost as
if it were paper (or a pro-version of those photo T-shirts you can
get done at Snappy Snaps). For all that, print - ancient or
modern - is still, of course, much more widely experimented
with in women's fashion and wardrobes than it is men's. Perhaps
it's something to do with childhood Paisley traumas, or the
ever-present risk of looking like a clown or the office wacky
tie-guy, or just the way that - outside of safe checks and nautical
stripes - it doesn't cater to our preference for risk-free style
codes. This season, though, more big designers have dared to print
far more contentious material on men's clothes, from Prada's
florals to tribal designs, exotic birds and boldly abstract epics
at print veterans Etro. And next week, print-centric new label Agi
and Sam will hold its first ever London Fashion Week catwalk show,
having been selected as one of the nation's best new menswear
labels. It's no great surprise: the design duo won lots of admirers
with a smaller-scale presentation at the last fashion week, and you
can tell their palette from a mile off. Nominally, Sam Cotton is
the print half of the partnership, and Agape "Agi" Mdumulla is in
charge of the cut of the cloth, but, as Mdumulla explained on a
stool in their east London studio, it's more fluid than that. "We
both have ideas for everything but I can't use Illustrator and
Photoshop and Sam can't use a sewing machine. I studied menswear
design and Sam studied Illustration, so if we're sat there and he
says, 'Why don't we design something like this…' then I'm the one
who can actually make it." The autumn/winter collection the pair
were working on - their fourth - was, Cotton said, "Looking at the
evolution of man and fabrics." We won't spoilerise the specific
story that inspired their imminent show, but chocolate wafers and
time travel both feature. As for the collection, there are cleverly
refined and resized prints that look like thick, multicoloured
wool, tweed and tartan till you get up close to see they're totally
textureless. (Cotton has found producers able to use dye
sublimation, a less costly and fiddly alternative to digital
printing, and get similar results on more fabrics.) This hint of an
optical illusion is something of a trademark; explaining one lovely
avian print, Cotton says they also looked at "tessellations by
Escher." You don't need a fine art degree to get the appeal of
their prints, mind - as Agi points out, the textural intrigue of a
simple sweatshirt that looks like a woolly jumper is enough to draw
a stranger ever closer to you in a bar. Cotton also has a proven
commercial eye, having seen his work make it on to finished
garments during his stints in the print departments at Alexander
McQueen, J.W. Anderson and Karl Lagerfeld, and from there, on to
the backs of retiring musical flowers like Kanye West and Rufus
Wainwright. Cotton doesn't only want to make outfits for pop stars,
though. "We've kind of got known using this full printed look, but
now we're using more plains and trying to make it more inclusive,"
he said. With the printed pieces, he says, the secret now, as
always, is to keep the ingenuity in the print design, not the cut
of the garment itself. "You can't really put print on weird shapes,
it's just too much weirdness at one time." Final proof that Britain
is ready for Agi & Sam's playful pattern cognition? Cotton
recently heard the ultimately bittersweet tribute that proves a
young British label is going places: in the design studio of an
all-conquering UK menswear chain, there's a whole "inspiration"
board covered in his prints.