Digna Kosse

Dutch Design Week: graduate designer Digna Kosse presents a series of dresses made of the smallest amount of fabric at the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduate Galleries exhibition this week. Digna Kosse designed fifteen dresses that are far from voracious consumers of material. She demonstrates that you can minimize these pieces of clothing to a few threads at the most. Minimal Dresses are wispier than wispy, yet they remain feminine dresses with which to make a fashion statement.

Veasyble by GAIA

 

The project is based on three keywords: isolation, intimacy and ornament. It consists of a set of wearable objects that can be converted into means of isolation, to create a personal intimacy

in any environment. The idea derives from a reflection on the change in our relationship with the domestic environment, due to the effects of our increasing mobility, and how this has affected our concept of intimacy, creating new demands. This led to the design of four accessories, screen for four different parts of the body: eyes, ears, face and upper body, expressing, through their shape and colour, our desire for intimacy at any time, any place, on various levels.

An ornament that can be worn.
A gesture to transform it.
A secret place for personal intimacy.
A reminder of our exterior aspect.

A strong, dominant exterior that conceals a fragile, personal interior.

Every accessory is shaped according to a pattern that is the same for all. The difference arises in the scale of production, which depends on our demand of intimacy

Kathy Ludwig & Florian Kräutli

In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies brought by various entities to cope with anxiety. Dutch designers, Kathy Ludwig & Florian Kräutli, responded to the idea by conceiving a series of accessory/wearable devices that wearers can act upon when faced with certain fears.



Tze Goh

For his graduate collection, Central Saint Martin's graduate Tze Goh conceived a minimally white yet sculptural collection, almost resembling clouds. Made of foam materials fused with jersey, each garment looked as if they were molded than sewn; cape folded at the neck; a coat twisting lapels; simple dress silhouettes with subtle dips and waves.

Shop Window Continued

Shop Window

Blood Scarf by Laura Splan

Blood Scarf succeeds as a work of art in several ways.  First, the piece elicits a feeling of queasiness, garnering strong reactions seeing a woman wearing a scarf filled with her own blood.   Yet by turning the medical tubing into a scarf, Splan draws attention to not only the beautiful red hue of our blood, but also to its biological purpose of circulating nutrients and warmth to our bodies.  She shows the fragility of such a system, thus succeeding in creating a piece of art that brings attention to biological facts through subjective emotions.

Painful

 

Susie Macmurray

piece entitled 'Window' black nappa leather, 43 kg adamantine dressmakers pins, tailors dummy

Louise Richardson

The piece is mesmerising. A dress hangs suspended from a pole and is, for all intents and purposes, made of fur. Step up and study it more closely, and with some difficulty the optical illusion shifts to reveal that the fur is not fur at all, but thousands of nails painstakingly pushed through a length of muslin to settle into a pattern of copper swirls and waves.

Mona Hatoum

Hirochika Kameyama Armour

Previously I've posted about armour in fashion. I like these protective coverings and I've found a new up and coming Japanese fashion & costume designer Hirochika Kameyama, a designer to keep an eye on.Hirochika studied fashion design at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London a few years ago and is now working in Japan.

His textile approach to fashion creates depth with

ruffles and ruched details which make the dresses look like modern armour.

 

 

Soft Smokes by Kate Jenkins

I found these cute 'soft smokes' on Kate Jenkins website Cardigan. I love all her work as I feel its really similar to my crochet work with faux food. I'd really love to make some of these for myself, right now as a side project I've been working on a 'what not to crochet' range where I crochet items that wouldn't usually be crochet more age appropriate items ie. crochet breasts,tampons see pictures bellow.

16th Century Style

Women's neckwear began as something extravagant with the emergence of the neck ruff during the sixteenth century, which was actually a garment piece originally designed into menswear. The earliest ruffs served a protective function as pieces meant to be worn as a covering to men's outerwear. The functional pieces eventually morphed into stylish fashion and became worn by both men and women alike. Ruffs implied status for women and were occasionally worn in such flamboyant sizes that they seemed to drown their wearer. The ruff eventually fell out of major fashion by the late seventeenth century, but nowadays it has re-emerged, flashing its flouncy frilly face in haute couture collections and costuming.

I've been experiementing with layering teabags onto string to recreate these ruffs of the past. Its very time consuming as the process is fairly involved and montonous (boil,drink,desconstruct,stain,dry). I've taken some photos of the samples and my progress so far.

Protective Coverings

Upcycled Video Tape

It appears I've been beaten by Kai Yeung Yan I found her when I was researching different weaving mateirals online. Kai Yeung Yan goes to London College of fashion and has managed to make captivating garments by weaving video tape into textiles. Yan bought the video tape from a second-hand shop and then stitched it on garments to visualize music with different pitches and frequencies by varying the heights and widths of the pleating.

Cornelia Parker's Pornograghic Drawings

These delicate, watery images are distinctly sexual in appearance, though the shapes occurred by chance. The suggestion of body parts is appropriate, since the ink the artist used was made by dissolving pornographic video tapes. Describing the process, Parker says: "I dissolved pornographic video tapes in solvent and made Rorschach blots with the stain. The video tapes were shredded by the Customs and Excise who decide what should be taken out of circulation. I’m making you look at them again but they’ve become an abstraction...I just dropped these blots of ‘ink’ onto paper and folded it. I didn’t dictate what images appeared." 

I was told about this by a ex-tutor of mine, It really opened my eyes to the level of disortion a starting material can go through. I previously had been looking at knitting and weaving video tape but now I realise that I'm not thinking outside the box enough. I still want to experiment with the tape as an altenative to yarn but I also want to experiement with its strength and durablity by manipulating it further with other materials, possibly looking at other ways of breaking it down with inspiration from Cornelia Parker's experiments with solvent.

Reclaimed Video Tape



More to come.


I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with this new material but I'm thinking of knitting or weaving with these reclaimed video tapes into fabric..

Tea bags

After some sewing and gluing I have constructed a length of self-made fabric from the used tea bags. I've been drinking a lot of tea recently these are a mix of jasmine, mint and green tea. To finish this piece I think I want to seal it with PVA glue because I've tested it and it seems to darken the teabags and make them more transparent also it'll give it a nice shiny finish. From the photographs you can see that I've taken to hanging the fabric piece in my window because you can see the imperfections of each tea bag when light is shined behind it.

Cigarettes

This morning due to the break in the rainy showers of the past few days I did some litter picking, I went around the flats near my house with gloves picking up used cigarettes.Unfortunately do to the rain they are still a bit soggy so  I'm drying them out. They will be used in my cigarette fabric that I've previously posted. I'm going to need to obtain quite a lot of cigarette butts to fill the pockets of the teabags so I imagine from now on I'll be carrying some gloves and a plastic bag around with at all times. Its nice because I feel like I'm truly recycling. 

Kitchen/Studio



I turned my kitchen into a studio today. As I went to sleep last night I was thinking about teabags and the different shapes and sizes they come in these days, previously I've worked with triangular and circular bags but my mind wondered to more traditional shapes. After scouring my local shopping centre I came home with an overpriced box of individually wrapped jasmine flavoured teabags. I thought that the jasmine would atleast make the teabags give off a different scent which could add to my now fragrant portfolio. So this afternoon I've been hard at work, drinking tea,deconstructing,emptying,dying and drying teabags. I've yet to see if my venture will be successful as I plan to later in the week (once they are fully dried) to get out my needle and thread and begin the laborious job of sewing each individual bag together.

Cancer Stick Clothing Eco-friendly?

 

FACT:  Researchers say that in 2008, some 4.5 trillion cigarettes were stubbed out all over the world.

Alexandra Guerrero is a Chilean designer who discovered that cigarette butts, if properly cleaned, can be recycled into a wool-like fabric and made into stylish, durable and eco-friendly clothing. According to ButtsOut an estimated 4.3 trillion cigarette butts are discarded around the world each year. So far Guerrero has used about 5,000 cleaned and recycled cigarette butts to design a dress, a vest, a hat a poncho and even some soap. 5,000 recycled cigarette butts isn't much of an impact compared to the amount littered each year but it is a start and Guerrero does hope to recycle more in the future.

To clean the cigarette butts they are first placed through an autoclaves. Then the cigarette butts are washed in a polar solvent, put back in an autoclaves, rinsed, dried and then shredded. Once cleaned the recycled cigarette fiber is dyed different colors and separated by color. The colored cigarette fibers are then spun together with natural sheep wool. This end fabric is what is used to make the clothing. About 10% of the fabric is recycled cigarette butts. When financially feasible Guerrero hopes to increase the percentage of cigarette butts to wool in the fabric mix.

Alexandra Guerrero Article

Response to Susie Freeman/Lady Gaga