London-based Canadian designer Mark Fast oversees the installation of a knit sculpture in Brookfield Place that he created as part of Luminato.Della Rollins for The Globe and Mail
When Mark Fast first walked through the soaring glass-and-steel atrium at Brookfield Place in downtown Toronto, he wondered if he'd bitten off more than he could spin. Normally, the Canadian knitwear designer fashions his one-off pieces on a live model, often one of his friends. This was going to be a challenge of a different magnitude.
Wandering through the vast space, which was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, Fast was thinking about the knitted sculpture he'd agreed to create in the atrium for the Luminato festival. "I just couldn't believe how massive it was," says the 29-year-old designer, remembering that anxiety-filled moment as he sits down to tea in London, the city that's been his home for almost a decade.
But then he looked up at the steel-ribbed ceiling of the Allen Lambert Galleria and thought: Wait, this isn't so bad. I just have to think of it as a giant version of my knitting machine.
This calmed him somewhat, and put everything in perspective. Fast, over the past few years, has become celebrated for creating sexy, body-conscious knitwear, and notorious for daring to drape those pieces over models who appear to have eaten a hot meal since 1997.
He's happy to talk about curvy girls, but right now he wants to talk about knitting machines, and how they helped inspire his first, giant piece of sculpture. (The installation, The Ascension of Beauty, will hang in the atrium at Brookfield Place - formerly BCE Place - until June 20.)
"Knitting machines are very weird," he says. The industrial machines, which look like an electronic keyboard giving birth to a scarf, are highly covetable. Fast, who was taught to hand-knit by his grandmother, but learned to use a machine while studying fashion at Central Saint Martins in London, is leery about talking about them too much - there are even bidding wars for them on eBay. The one he uses in his studio in Hackney, East London, "has a mind of its own." Often he feels like the machine is the master, and he's just there to feed it wool.
So, having decided that his giant knit sculpture would be a larger version of something he produces on the machine, Fast called his cousin Conrad Koslowsky, an architecture student in Canada, and they set to work realizing their dream: breaking down the walls between knitting and engineering.
"I taught Conrad how to knit," Fast says. "We've been dreaming about this for years." If they could combine their disciplines, fashion design and building design, "then maybe knitwear could become a model for architects."
It's easy to get caught up in Fast's yarn utopia, thanks to his serene, Zen-like charm. With his shaggy hair and red lumberjack shirt, his quiet voice telling tales of building dams behind his childhood home outside of Winnipeg, he hardly seems to be from the same universe as Karl Lagerfeld, let alone the same line of work.
To better visualize the Luminato sculpture, Fast and Koslowsky made a replica of the atrium and began draping it with tiny links of chain, representing the yarn. At one end is a woman, clad in a flowing gown and dripping crystals, with her train stretching out behind her, draped like cobwebs from the roof. Fast has always been inspired by films, and in the back of his mind he was picturing Tilda Swinton hacking at her beautiful dress with scissors and teeth in Derek Jarman's film The Last of England - a regal presence both defined and constricted by the clothes she wears.
Swinton, with her greyhound proportions, does not have the kind of figure with which Fast is associated. For better or worse - and he's been criticized from snobbier corners - the designer is now known for choosing curvy, regular-sized models for his London shows. He's so adamant about it that it caused a rift with his stylist, who disapproved of the larger models and stomped off before one of the shows.
He may seem dreamy, but clearly there's a will of iron under all that wool. "For me, beauty extends beyond that catwalk look. I want to inspire women to be happy with what they have themselves."
He's just got word that he may be invited to present his next show in Paris during Fashion Week, where the controversy is bound to arise again. Right now, though, he's not thinking of bottoms and hips, but a certain vast hall of glass in downtown Toronto.
What, in the end, does he hope to convey with The Ascension of Beauty? Fast pauses and says, somewhat enigmatically, "It's a rope of emotion from the sky. It's about intricacy. Fragility mixed with hardness." The poor man has to knit the thing - don't expect him to describe it as well. You'll just have to see for yourself.
The Ascension of Beauty hangs at Brookfield Place, 181 Bay St., Toronto, to June 20.