In June 2024, Eurovision 2024 winner Nemo performed The Code inside a HARRI London inflatable latex dress at the Royal Academy of Arts, as part of London Fashion Week. The dress, named Le Chapiteau, took 300 hours, six pairs of hands, and 300 seams to construct. It was the largest inflatable garment HARRI London had ever built, designed to fill the full width of the stage, inflating around Nemo as the performance began. The show, HARRI London's fourth presentation and the first to foreground a single garment rather than a collection, became the viral moment of London Fashion Week 2024.
Chapter 4: A Singular Piece, a Colosseum, and Nemo
In place of a traditional runway, HARRI London presented a single inflatable latex ensemble to an audience seated in the colosseum-like Benjamin West Lecture Theatre at the Royal Academy of Arts. The piece was the most technically sophisticated work HARRI London had produced: a dress constructed to operate at architectural scale, designed specifically for the dimensions and atmosphere of the room. Nemo, whose Eurovision-winning song The Code had earned them the title of Eurovision 2024 champion just weeks earlier in Malmo, Sweden, performed a rendition of the track as the dress inflated around them to fill the stage.
The HARRI x Nemo collaboration brought together two practices built around the same refusal: to accept the form as given. Nemo's song The Code, which incorporates elements of opera, pop, rap and dance, depicts their journey of embracing a non-binary identity. HARRI London's work proposes bodies that no existing silhouette has described. The alignment was the work of a shared premise, not a styling decision.
Picture Credits: Cieran Jay Forster
The Show: From Deflated to Monumental
The show began with the deflated dress and sombre lighting. Guests seated in the amphitheatre-style room waited. After a short address from Harri KS, Nemo was guided into the dress by the team. As an orchestral arrangement filled the room, the dress began to inflate. By the time Nemo's voice reached its first soaring note, Le Chapiteau had expanded to fill the entirety of the stage.
The design of the room shaped the design of the garment. The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre's white walls and circular benches carry the atmosphere of a place built for collective attention, part church, part lecture hall, part theatre. Light moves differently in a room like that. HARRI London built Le Chapiteau to respond to it: the dress was not designed for a generic runway but for this specific space, its proportions calibrated to the ceiling height and the sightlines of the seated audience.
Picture Credits: Andrea Brandt
300 Hours, Six Pairs of Hands
Le Chapiteau took over 300 hours and six pairs of hands to produce from conception to completion. Every seam, all 300 of them, was hand-constructed in the HARRI London studio at Smithfield. The full story of how the dress was made is documented in the Making Le Chapiteau piece on the Journals blog.
Nemo's performance was the final element that the dress required. The ability to hold a note as the latex expanded around them, standing still at the centre of an inflating architectural structure, demanded a specific kind of performer. Nemo's vocal range and their understanding of what the garment was trying to do made the performance possible. Read the full HARRI x Nemo interview for Nemo's account of the collaboration in their own words.
The Viral Success of London Fashion Week 2024
According to Dash Hudson, HARRI London was the viral success of London Fashion Week 2024, recording the largest Instagram follower growth and highest Instagram engagement of any brand across the event. The presentation was covered by WWD, Reuters, Wonderland, and every major fashion publication. The reach confirmed what the dress had already demonstrated inside the Royal Academy: that a single garment, built at the right scale and performed in the right room, can do more than a full collection.
The About HARRI London page sets out the design philosophy behind the work. The inflatable collection at harri.store includes the garments that share Le Chapiteau's founding logic: air, sealed inside latex, producing volume independent of the body underneath. The HARRI x Nemo collaboration page documents the full context of the partnership.
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Cover image: Rossella Damiani. Performance images: Cieran Jay Forster. Installation images: Andrea Brandt.
