Chaos.Actor Limited Editions

Chaos.Actor is the creation of Dylan Orchard – artist and designer. The focus behind it is to create a space for sharing more coherent artistic ‘projects’ in the form of fashion, with each new collection revolving around a central style or theme. From range to range though there’s no aspiration to continuity, no attempt to create a wider brand or identity, or to target any particular market beyond those who see something in what’s created here.

I don’t come from a fashion background, or a visual art one for that matter. I started drawing as a distraction from writing and soon found that the distraction was consuming me more than the words on the page were. I never set out to design things for people to wear, or to design things at all, I drew what reflected my mindset at any given time, or the ideas that I was focused on. I do still carry a deep rooted idea of narrative with me from my years spent writing prose though. That sense of a story to be told applies just as much to what I’m trying to do here at Chaos.Actor as anywhere else and while the concepts and styles might seem disparate there’s always a path linking them in my mind.

For Collection .001 that story is one about the city, London specifically but any city big enough to disappear in really. I’m born and raised here and ultimately I know I can never escape it. Everything I create, everything I do is defined on some level by the nature of this place, be it good, bad or indifferent. Even when I try to create in adversity to it, to escape the chaos and depth of concrete, I’m still doing so as a part of it, insepererable and caged or created and liberated by it. All depending on the day, the time and the moment I find myself in.

Dylan Orchard