Choose fashion, choose to customise your style: Twisted Generation

by anna battista

Put it this way, if Twisted Generation's David Gilmore and Austin Rattray were ruling the world, we would all go around sporting exclusive creations. Not able to imagine such a world? It must be because you still haven't visited Twisted Generation's shop and website.

This hip fashion brand started in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2002, when Gilmore was working as designer and Rattray was finishing his medicine degree. "David had his own ideas about some t-shirts, but there weren't too many chances of developing them," Rattray remembers, "there wasn't the choice there is now for customised t-shirts then, so I thought a cheap but good way of doing it was setting up a website." The site turned out to be a successful idea, the brand got some international coverage and started selling its creations through the Internet all over the world, from the UK to America, from Japan to New Zealand. "We got picked up by magazines such as The Face," Rattray continues, "and, because of that, we sold well on the web and decided to open the shop."

Located in Glasgow's West End, the shop is a safe haven for people who want to make an individual fashion statement: it offers a selection of men and women's clothes and accessories by Twisted Generation and creations by a few local independent designers. Twisted Generation t-shirts and tops are for those who take fashion seriously: you can choose between t-shirts with basic printed images (from £15), stylish tops featuring elaborate handiwork forming figures, logos, words and hip slogans, or customise your own t-shirt for £45.

When Gilmore and Rattray started the brand, they practically did everything by themselves, from designing their creations to setting up their website, and doing some advertising and PR work, yet these weren't the most difficult aspects of their job. The hardest part was making sure the quality of the manufacture was good, especially because the items were produced in small quantities and this also meant making life hard for the printers. Nowadays, though, everything seems a bit easier for the duo: to overcome the printing problems, they bought their own printing and manufacturing equipment and they moved their studio to Glasgow's Southside, so they can produce small runs of particular products, but, as Gilmore underlines, they can also experiment more with inks and materials and produce more individual designs.

Uniqueness and individuality are the keywords of Twisted Generation's design ethos: expressing your individuality through fashion is at times difficult to achieve, especially in those cities where there are many huge retailers and just a few small independent fashion stores, but Gilmore thinks that trends have changed quite a bit over the last three years they have been in business, and that people have become more aware of fashion and of creating their own style. "There are some guys among our customers who, when we started out, wouldn't have worn a pink t-shirt, but now they come here, see a t-shirt, and ask us if we're going to make it in pink and if we can phone them when we make it," he says, "so I definitely think people are after something different nowadays."

The new year will see Twisted Generation launching an exclusive website: true fashion lovers will be able to find on it a wider range of items than in the shop, such as new and classic Twisted Generation t-shirts, but they will also be able to design clothes, order them in their favourite colours, or match various items among them, in a nutshell, they will be able to customise their own style on line. " I think this is actually something no other clothing website does and we feel we want to do it because it's unique and it's fun," Rattray states, "besides we will never be able to show everything we produce at one time in the shop because we are limited by space, yet we want to have a bigger range of stuff for people to see, and that's why the site is going to be improved. Now we also have our own photography studio and all the equipment to take by ourselves photo shoots of our creations. So we produce the garment, take a photograph of it and put it on the site and, in the same day, people can order it."

More confident and better organised, the Twisted Generation team is ready to start the new year, just don't ask them which trends you should be following in 2006. "I'm working on my own designs at the moment, so I'm not into any trend," Gilmore claims, smiling, "we're definitely anti-trends, but not anti-fashion."

{www.twistedgeneration.com}

(photographs: Twisted Generation Shop, De Courcy's Arcade, 5-21 Cresswell Lane, Glasgow, UK; pics by Anna Battista)