Kenzo - Embroidered Knitwear

Year: 2023
Client: Kenzo
Discipline: CGI / Procedural Animation
Role: CG Production

Orange knitted fabric in dappled shadow, with the word KENZO in raised light-blue stitched letters above part of a stitched tiger head in black, white and yellow.

Close-up of orange ribbed knit with black and white stitched strokes, a thin yellow line and a patch of red, forming fragments of an illustration.

Close-up of orange knit with a frayed white stitched shape over black stitched strokes and a beige corded outline, yellow and white stitching behind.

Shallow-focus close-up of a stitched tiger illustration on orange knit fabric: white whiskers and teeth, a red tongue outlined in black, and black, cream and yellow stripes.

Close-up of a stitched tiger face on orange knit: an eye, white whiskers, a red tongue outlined in black, and black, cream and yellow stripes.

Black knitted fabric with partly formed white stitched letters whose edges fray into loose fibres, below a curved white shape edged with dashed stitching.

Low-light close-up of black knit with a raised white fibrous shape and a row of white stitches, loose strands rising from its edges.

An Instagram campaign for Kenzo built around two embroidered knitwear designs, each presented in its own short animation. The aim was to celebrate the craft of embroidery itself: every design is built stitch by stitch on screen rather than revealed complete.

The original Kenzo illustrations arrived as layered source artwork, with every colour already separated. In Houdini, each colour became actual curve geometry, and the stitches were instanced along it, their placement and orientation derived procedurally so that the embroidery follows the original patterns, colour by colour.

A single attribute travels through the curves and drives the animation. It activates each stitch in turn, offsets its timing, and adds noise and displacement, so the pattern grows across the garment as if it were being sewn. Beneath it, the knitted fabric is itself built from instanced curves, and a Vellum simulation gives it an organic secondary motion.

I handled the CG production: preparation, Houdini procedural development, geometry, animation, simulation, shading, lighting, camera work, and rendering in Redshift. ONSHORE Studio produced the campaign and managed client communication and feedback; the original illustrations are Kenzo’s.