Sewing the Invisible: Jum Nakao's Paper Couture

The challenge of creating garments with unconventional materials has become an all too familiar gimmick for most first year students at fashion schools. The end result is more often than not a catwalk of garbage bags, zip ties, plastic bottles and cans, assembled into a menagerie of mediocrity. Enter Jum Nakao. But while the Japanese-Brasilian artist/fashion designer does use an unconventional and impractical material (paper) for his collection "A Costura do Invisivel"(translation: "Sewing the Invisible"), the results are far, far from gimmicky. They're pretty magical, in fact.

Nakao runs his atelier in São Paulo, and works in both the art/fashion and commercial design sectors. He has appeared in various museums and galleries around the world, as well as designed for large commercial clients, such as Nike. He lives and works by his own surrealistic slogan: "Beautiful like the meeting between a sewing machine and an umbrella over a dissection table".

Below, image from Nakao's stunning collection of paper couture created for the MOMU Fashion Museum in Antwerp.