Coldplay’s bassist makes a stylish pivot to fashion
Guy Berryman turns his ear and eye to design with label Applied Art Forms.
Guy Berryman is boarding a plane to Manila in a few hours to rejoin Coldplay, the band in which he has played bass for the past 28 years. He is two years into a world tour but periodically returns to his home in the Cotswolds, which is where he is today. We’re not talking music, though. While his main job involves him performing Yellow, Viva La Vida and The Scientist to stadiums filled with 80,000 people, his side hustle is a completely different affair.
Calling Applied Art Forms a side hustle is not really fair, though. And technically, the fashion collection Berryman launched in 2020 as founder and designer is actually his third career. Six years ago the car enthusiast and collector of classic vehicles started a motoring magazine for those who love automotive style but are not into the high-jinks and banter idiom of Top Gear. The Road Rat is a beautifully art-directed publication more redolent of design magazines than anything typically petrol head.
Berryman confesses to being “somewhat obsessive, but not always in a good way”. He has the entire collection of Auto Italia magazine filed chronologically at home, as well as a few watches. But most notably he has amassed a large archive of vintage clothing.
“I love flea markets, thrift stores and vintage shops,” he says. “In an unplanned way, over years as a travelling musician I have collected many pieces.”
Much of his hoard has military origins, and some of it is pressed into service: “I wear a ventile parka from the Royal Air Force from the 1950s and it’s one of the most incredible pieces ever designed; it’s aged and faded – old and patinated and threadbare – but it still looks great.”
Before becoming a musician, Berryman studied engineering and architecture. He became fascinated by the design element of vintage clothing. When, in 2017, Coldplay took their first break from touring since 1996, he was left with a year in which to pursue other interests.
He took his archive as inspiration, setting up a design studio in Amsterdam and beginning to conceive new takes on old pieces he loved. “We prototype everything in the studio – I call them our Frankenstein’s monsters,” he says. “We take vintage garments, disassemble them and cut them up to create a sculpture in fabric. We stick on pockets and pin things and sew things on. Then we send this with technical drawings to our factories in the Netherlands, Japan and Portugal. We hand-make one-offs in Amsterdam, too.”
The result is distinctive and will appeal to anyone who appreciates functional, utilitarian design with character. It can look a little Japanese in spirit, which is fine by Berryman; he loves the work of Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons. He insists he is designing for himself – on tour he wears one of his Frankenstein pieces, an “MA1 flight jacket style, which has a detachable gilet that layers over the top. I don’t think I’ve driven many sales, though!”. He is not interested in trends; the pieces are designed to stay in the collection over time.
For this season there’s a black cotton twill version of a World War I French motorcycle dispatch rider’s jacket, the BM1-8 Dispatch jacket, which has a double-breasted 10-button closure. There’s also a style Berryman calls the BM1-10 Beach Boy jacket. After the band? “No.
I found an old little black-and-white photo in a box somewhere of a boy on a beach in this jacket,” he says. “As I examined the grainy image, I saw that the pockets were only about an inch above the hem. It looked like his mum had chopped it off and resewed it to fit him. So I scaled
it up for an adult and made it in summer cotton twill.”
Berryman’s Applied Art Forms is full of such quirky details: motorcycle helmet bags fashioned from military parachutes; bespoke jackets in vintage Japanese boro (mended fabric) crafted from big patchworks of farmers’ and workers’ jackets that are used as wall coverings or table coverings or rugs.
“We turn them back into jackets,” Berryman says, delighted by the circularity.
It’s this kind of thinking that has driven Applied Art Forms to do something unusual in the fashion arena. Maybe it took a musician to see things differently.
This story was featured in the April issue of WISH.
