Give Us Our Sin Again!

By design duo - Monozygoitcs.

We started this collection just before we graduated from university in 2020.  As Covid-19 lockdowns began, and BLM protests started increasing – little did we know how much protest and resistance to authority would be happening over the next year.  At the time we were struck by the way that higher establishment exploits and controls us.  London is becoming uninhabitable for people on a creative sector wage – like they're trying to kill our character. 

Theres a mismatch between the actions that institutions demand of us, what we have to do to survive, and our individual desires.  We wanted to look into this idea of the two opposing forces – and then try to find a way to combine them, to find a middle ground that wasn’t so rebellious that it would be brushed away as extreme, but also to do something disruptive enough.  We didn’t want to present a fact, but more a set of questions.  How much agency do we really have?  Can rebellion ever make real change?  And to what level is peoples outrage real, VS at what point is it just commercialised into a trend or a fake claim for street cred.  It seems like there’s a very big difference between what people say, and what they do. 

For the side of the establishment we researched the 18th century wealthy courts – and their powerful fashion.  While for the side of the rebels we looked into punks.  And when it came to marrying the two together we decided to do this literally – with the wedding of characters from both sides of the fight.  Turning the collection into a religious event made sense to us, highlighting peoples devotion to the higher power that is fashion, with ritualistic consumer habits, and obsession with icons.  We did a lot of historical and conceptual research for this project – some of which is very interesting, and which we used to influence ever single tiny design detail.  So for a breakdown of the concepts that went into each look you can see detailed descriptions on our instagram – or take a look at our project zine. 

​As always for each project we pick a charity related to the topics we have explored in our work, and donate to them with every purchase.  For 'GIVE ME MY SIN AGAIN' the charity we have chosen this time is oxfam - as their work to combat poverty directly links to ideas of wealth and class that we have explored in this project.   

All the eerie and characterful film photographs above were all taken by the lovely Max Wiggins (he/him), while the incredible photographs below this text were taken by Angela Ogunfojuri (she/her) whos work you can view on aogunsphotography.com.  

All the stunning makeup was done by Bryanna Angel (she/her) who you can find on instagram @bryanna_angel_mua, and the fabulous hair and wig styling was done by Liza Karsanidi (@_lizawithaz_) and Vassilios Argholekas (@eliakeim)