Class#8 13/08/09

Today’s class was about environment and how it can impact the meaning of the garment. The first half of the class was putting together the lady to present to Adele. It was a really good exercise to complete as a group and I think the class worked together well. Plus it was a fun activity to do, which made it a lot easier to work on. When we presented her to Adele each person in the class went through each body part that they made and we spoke about how we went about constructing them. The discussion was really good. As designers we are always designing for the body but never we never physically make anything that is designed specifically for body parts. We design sleeves; not arms, pants; not legs, dresses not torsos/chest. It’s strange that we don’t think of the body as we design. We think about shapes, distorting, manipulating and abstracting existing shapes.

Svetlana wearing her garments that were made for the body parts

Svetlana being introduced to Adele

Svetlana

We named the lady Svetlana, and one thing she was missing was structure. Someone made an interesting point about the different ways Architecture students would have gone about making the lady. As Fashion designers we think about the outer first, whereas they might have thought about building a solid internal structure to begin with.

We took Svetlana outside the class to see how people would react to her. Apart from being kicked out of Mr. Tulks café, most people were very curious about her. When someone was carrying her, people would shy away from looking directly at her, whereas when we left her on her own, they were more willing to show their curiosity by looking at her.


Svetlana at Tulks

The second part of the class was making an environment for our garment definition. I was stuck thinking about what I could do, I didn't have a lot of materials to use. There was one piece of fabric that I looked at and it reminded me of water, so I started thinking if my garment were put in an underwater environment would it still be a valid definition? I did add into my definition that the garment needs to be durable.

Underwater envrironment

But if you're underwater you need some kind of protection, so maybe I need to add that in. This is where I'm getting confused because no garment is universal, so it's almost like you need a definition for each garment you create. And maybe this is a better way of looking at it, how could there be a blanket definition for a garment? Clothes are so personal. When I was reading through the questions everyone has a completely different perspective of what clothing/fashion is so you could go insane trying to create a definition that everyone can relate to.