Fine Art - Fashion (Artists and Designers)

I have decided to show the work of the Artists I looked at from the last post, in a separate post, in order to speak more in depth about them and show their work, without the original post getting too cluttered. The themes we looked into seemed how things can be adjustable and worn differently, without being modified, and how the garments looked in 2D and the difference that made.


Rei Kawakubo - Rei Kawakubo's work was very influential for this work, due to her very minimalist designs that seem to use a lot of fabric that is able to be draped and adjusted. This is particularly interesting as it means each garment can have the ability to change and look very different for each individual person. This also means that the garment could be timeless.
As well as looking at her clothing being work, we also looked at Naoya Hatakeyama's photographs of Kawakubo's garments flat. This gave us an idea of how intricate and put together her designs were, despite being minimal. It also showed us how even in 2D her clothing managed to look very well designed, and how they even looked like individual pieces of art when displayed. These were from Comme des Garcons A/W 1992-93 collection.

Bless Design - I looked into some of Bless designs work and found some pieces that relate to the work we did involving objects, the space and the shirt. A chair of theirs appears to be covered in fabric, or made out of  fabric, and is adjustable and movable
Another piece of theirs is a lightweight car cover, made out of fabric, that was intended to not only be used as a car cover, but also able to worn, sat on or sleep on. Other pieces of Bless designs, which I unfortunately do not have any images of, are multi-purpose clothing. Clothing that is made to be worn in a variety of ways (such as both a shirt and a skirt) depending on how its put together on the person.





Issey Miyake - I looked mainly at two pieces by Issey Miyake, one showed how many individual garments could be created out of one tube of fabric.
The other collection I looked at was his 132.5 collection. This collection is a great example of how the 2D display can be used as an art piece just as much as the worn clothes. The angular, geometric clothing, when flat, produces mandala like shapes and patterns of folds, and it is essentially origami clothing. Although our 2D fabric pieces were very simple, it was very interesting to see how complicated and extreme they could become.

As well as looking at these artists and their techniques, I also found some images that I thought related to this segment of the project as they showed similar effects and shapes to what we created.

Artist Unknown

The Lovers by René Magritte

Hussein Chalayan

Fine Art - Shirts and Fashion

To begin our Fine Art taster project, we were asked to we were asked to bring in and work with shirts, looking at the work of experimental fashion designers for inspiration (to show how Fine Art is linked to, and important to many different areas of art and design). This was not so we produced nice looking garments, but so we started to think more abstractly about how we wear the shirts and how we can create interesting, sculptural shapes using ourselves and our garments. We worked individually and in groups.

To start, I worked on my own, and simply tried wearing the shirt differently, by the placement on my body, and draping it differently. It was very interesting to see the variety of ways to wear one piece of clothing. For this we looked at the work of Rei Kawakubo as many of her designs contain elements that can be worn in different ways.

As a group of three, we looked at combining our shirts together and producing one piece to wear in different ways. While doing this, we also looked at how the way we posed and moved produced different effects and shapes the the clothing.

After that, we looked at how are we and our garments can interact with our environment by combining ourselves, the shirts and an object (a stool). I found this particularly interesting, as we were able to hide the person more, leaving just their covered shape, so despite the shape of a body being recognisable, it looked as if it was just the shirt and stool combined. 

We then looked at using the shirt to cover and protect individual objects (a chair) and areas of the room (the window). This was influenced particularly by Bless Designs who often combined fashion, household objects and architecture, often covering things in fabric, or creating fabric shapes. 

Afterwards, I took my shirt and dismantled it, in order to have each segment of the shirt, to reassemble it, concentrating on how it would look displayed in 2D, looking at the designers Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake. I started to think about many different things about my shirt to inspire me, why I was using it (because it was old and falling apart), how it had been used previously (to cover and protect), the sort of fabric it was made with (seemingly quite dense and heavy) and what other shapes it had created (often very curved).  Through this I looked into creating a very strong looking piece, by using more angular, square shapes, in order to contrast the fragility of the actual shirt and to highlight the more protective (through covering) elements of the fabric and resilient look of the fabric.

I then Experimented on how this piece could be worn. The overall look of the worn garment reminded me of "warrior-esque" armour or clothing, particularly Japanese.