It was after meeting Salim Edde, a passionate collector and owner of MIM, Beirut’s mineral museum and third largest private collection in the world, that Tony Ward had a revelation. Inspired from minerals, nature’s precious treasures, with their geometrical shapes, colours and textures, he created the Autumn/Winter 2015-16 collection with a skillful assembly of new techniques. It is a collection defined by unique mixtures. Noble materials like organza or jacquard blend in with embroidery and paint to recreate nature’s true sensations. Dresses adorn themselves with rock-like structures, shimmering illusion of crystalline reflections and pleats that mimic flowing lava. In this collection, minerals are omnipresent with their tube and prism shapes as well as the colours used by Tony Ward: iridescent, amber, topaz, aquamarine, sapphire and graphite. Tony Ward transports us with this collection into the centre of the Earth, where ultra-meticulous work was necessary to recreate the crystalline shapes that take millennia to form, shedding the light on all the poetry and sweetness nature offers us.
