Your aesthetic is hyper-contemporary, celebrating the female form. How do you relate to beauty & body positivity and how do these influence your designs and aesthetic?

Designing from a place that I personally relate to is a key element in my work – most often first toiles happen on me and then I’ll start to work through with fittings on other women. I think it is so important for designers to have a physical understanding of the work they are making and what it feels like to wear the pieces. And so, instinctually the size I make the samples in is most often is a UK 14 so that I can get a physical understanding everything – it helps with design solutions and problem-solving. After that, I then get to work on larger or smaller pieces that are custom made for people.
At times I can find it quite difficult to always be working with others that share in my values of diversity of casting and trying to make sure a variety of women can picture themselves in what I am making. Or I can often feel myself hoping that because someone wants to work with me this could signal a shift for them to become more inclusive and diversify their representation…but this is rarely the case…
It just seems senseless to narrow down the types of bodies you would want to represent your clothes – it just cuts you off from a whole universe of beauty and amazing ways for what you are making to be represented. It limits the artistic possibilities of your work as well as potential clients being able to see themselves in what you are making. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to cut yourself off from audiences that could love the style of what you do.
Perhaps the instinct for variety comes too from being raised with a sense of variety, I am mixed-raced, Jamaican and English raised in London, I pass for white but don’t look all that much like my white family members, nor, in a shallow way, like my black family members for that matter – so a sense of multiplicity has always been with me.
It is also important to me to think about younger people who might see my work and to hope that they can find something aspirational – when I was younger visions around eroticism always seemed so aspirational to me. And to try to stop that vision being limited to only a certain type of person. In photography, I feel like you have the power to declare anything as magnificent so it is important to make good use of this tool.

You are renegotiating the erotic female image through a female lens. What is your perspective on eroticism? Do you think that through erotic transgressions, there is the possibility for true human freedom and communication as the French philosopher Georges Bataille argues?

Finding voices that describe a female orientated sexuality described by a female voice has always been important to me. Honestly, I’ve never been able to read all that much Bataille, I tried when I was 18 and then tried again to read his work when I was around 20 but I just couldn’t relate to the way ideas are put forward. Though, in looking into other authors, I suppose, I have come across somewhat similar ideas… In ‘The Erotic as Power’ Audre Lorde describes the erotic as a power that comes from sharing deeply with another person, whether that sharing is physical, emotional or intellectual – and that this erotic connection becomes a lens through which we can scrutinize other aspects of our lives in a striving towards meaning. Desire is life a force, I personally think of it less as an avenue through which to assume freedom but rather as an energy that powers many more cravings than those immediately assumed to be erotic. Miriam Decosta-Willis described eroticism as the life force that flows like an inscrutable tide through all things. I find eroticism to be a power I can make use of in many areas of my life. Erotic connections can be the most clear and honest – an amazing way to break through clumsier attempts at connection like through language. Aesthetics too are an incredible form of connection that can feel much truer than words. There is power in image, and aesthetics themselves are emotional tools capable of communication beyond the visual into the sensitive.
There is also this amazing anthology of erotic writing by women that was put together by Margaret Reynolds. There is a great quote from Jeanette Winterson in that book describing the pieces of writing as a chance to offer a looking glass into female eroticism as self-described rather than a distorting mirror. I aim to try and do that too with my own work. Thoughts on eroticism from queer women have been a mainstay of influence in what I am designing.

You are a queer designer, what does it mean to you to be designing for women as a queer woman?

This has been something that I have thought about a lot and at times have just felt awkward about. I think being attracted to women fuels a lot of my work and vision of an erotic female image but honestly, I do still get quite self-conscious about it. There is probably still some internalised homophobia that I have to work through. I think I perhaps try extra hard to make sure that things don’t feel lurid or leering… though I’m certain all of this only happens in my own head… but still, it is important to put attention to…There is an element of voyeurism in my work that I hope feels more like an internal and owned space rather than something being intruded upon. But it is a fine line to tread to make people feel like they are coming into a world rather than to feel that they are looking in.

Future plans for Ellis Jaz?

I haven’t been able to work on any performance work for the last year so that is a big wish that I hope will come true in the upcoming year. And then, you know, to just keep going.