Name: Bixuan Li
Class: Creative Technical Studio
Date: 2018.11.01
Project 1 Design Statement
The inspiration of my designs for this project is oil painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping by Lucian Freud. Lucian is a master of painting portraits especially nude ones, and has an interesting style of portraying humans. He tend to separate the human face and body into sections represented by patches of color of different tone and shades.
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping was a piece modeled by Sue Tilly and completely by Lucian in 1995, and is one of Lucian’s most well known pieces. It portrays Sue Tilly lying naked on a couch and her body forming layers of natural fold due to her gesture and how she was interacting with the couch. I was very much attracted by the folds and wanted to design a dress that is inspired by the shapes of fold on the model’s body. While Sue Tilly lies on the couch, her body folds and spreads on the couch surface, yet the shape of her body is restricted by the couch surface. I would like to create a dress that represents Sue Tilly’s folds portrayed in the painting and how her body is restricted by its surroundings.
The dress project is the first garment that I have ever made, therefore I really like it despite its numerous imperfections. I really enjoyed making the outer piece, and I think it is well made. It is especially pleasing to see interfacings of the outer garment that took a long time to make fitting perfectly and making the piece look complete. The only thing that I did not like so much was the gathering part. Gathering two double-layer silk pieces was extremely hard, and even with a width 4 stitch the thread fell apart multiple times when I was trying to gather. Hand gathering was not possible either since the silk georgette and crepe was so slippery and it was too hard to keep the fabrics in place. The shape of gatherings did not turn out how I wanted, and the inner side of the gatherings was messy. So gathering would be something that I will try to do a better job with if I were to use this technique next time. Overall the project proved to be very challenging but highly rewarding.
Inspiration Image–Benefits Supervisor Sleeping
Sketches
Final Sketches
Fabrics
Treatments
Process Photos
Photo shoot–Model: Vicky Liu
