Saul Nash at the Royal Opera, a second epidermis

A menswear designer who trained in dance before he trained with scissors. A choreographer who has spent thirty years turning bodies into diagrams. Wayne McGregor hands Saul Nash the costumes for Quantum Souls, and the pairing arrives on the Covent Garden stage as if it had always been the plan.

Nash is in his east London studio, cutting panels for dancers at the Royal Ballet. The commission is Quantum Souls, the world premiere that closes Wayne McGregor: Alchemies at the Royal Opera House. The triple bill opened on 20 April and runs through 6 May. Seven performances in all.

McGregor has built the evening as a three-part programme. Yugen returns with Edmund de Waal's porcelain set and Shirin Guild's original dress. An earlier piece reopens the bill. The new work sits at the close, the part the company has been rehearsing the longest, and the part Nash has been sewing for since January.

Cut for motion

Nash trained as a dancer before he trained as a designer. His label, launched in 2018 from a studio in Hackney, runs on a grammar of technical jersey, bonded seams, and panels engineered around the shoulder and hip. The menswear shows at London Fashion Week have always carried a performative element. Models move, rather than walk. A shoulder catches light. A hem does not flap.

Ballet hands him a brief he has been answering for almost a decade. The fabrics Nash has developed for Quantum Souls are pieced together from technical weaves milled in Italy and finished by a supplier in north London. They hold the body without compressing it. Nash talks about a second epidermis, and the phrase earns itself the moment the dancers step out of the wings.

The cast

William Bracewell, Melissa Hamilton and Joseph Sissens carry the work. Rehearsals with Nash ran across three weeks in the Opera House studios, fitting and re-fitting, pushing the seams to the points where the choreography asks the most of them. A seam is the argument in a costume like this. A badly placed one turns a jeté into an apology. A well-placed one disappears.

Composer Bushra El-Turk wrote the score for Quantum Souls, with live percussion from Beibei Wang on stage. The pit opens onto the floor at a number of points, Wang playing in the dancers' sightlines rather than underneath them. Nash has dressed her too, in a loose layered piece that accommodates both sticks and bow.

Costume fitting, Royal Opera House studios. Photography by Andrej Uspenski / Royal Ballet and Opera, via 10 Magazine

The lineage

The Opera House commissions fashion designers for costume work with intent. Jonathan Anderson of Loewe dressed Lazuli last season. Nash joins a line that runs back through Giles Deacon, Gareth Pugh, and, further, Karl Lagerfeld. The names matter less than the principle. A designer in the rehearsal room earns their place on the choreographer's terms, not fashion's.

What Nash brings is a proof of concept the industry has been trying to stitch for years. Technical sportswear that moves with the body, and reads, from the stalls, as a third act of a long conversation between streetwear and the stage. The costumes would look correct at Sadler's Wells. They would also look correct walking off the fashion week schedule in June.

Covent Garden, April

Nash has kept close to the work. The last fortnight has meant long evenings at the theatre, stitching corrections into the jackets during interval breaks, watching how the light on the Opera House stage catches the technical mesh. The fabric reads matte from the stalls and liquid from the gallery. He has been checking both.

The menswear show in June, at the Old Selfridges Hotel, now carries another frame. A ballet has fed back into the studio. What comes out the other end is the evidence of it.

Tickets for the remaining performances are mostly gone. The seventh and final night, on 6 May, still holds a handful of returns. Worth the wait at the box office.