The aim of this project was to design and make a headdress for an icon that I greatly admire. The piece must collapsible.
Research
My heroine was Marie Curie. People know her as the woman scientist who went through a lot of struggles and discovered radium and polonium with her husband. She was the first woman to attain a Nobel prize. As I researched more about her personality, I came across this memoir that she wrote that really inspired me. She was describing her husband when she first met him:
“I was struck by the open expression of his face, and by the slight suggestion of detachment in his whole latitude, his speech, rather slow and deliberate, his simplicity and his smile at once grave and youthful, inspire confidence. He seems to me a dreamer, absorbed in his reflections.”
-Source: BBC Interviews
This made me realize that Marie Curie was really quite a romantic character. I also found out that she and her husband would bring some radium to night parties, and dancers would smear them all over their dresses and dance with the illumination of radium. Marie is definitely romantic, playful and has a great sense of humor, which is not what many people commonly know of Marie.
I decided to make her a party headpiece that is romantic, with tulle. It was collapsible by the layers and from the top view, it will be adorned with radium-coloured ribbons, that form the atomic structure of polonium. The headpiece serves as a tribute to her, as well as something of a little humor.
Experimentation
I experimented with smocking, which pleasantly turned out to look like brains in the following process.
Process
-
- I realise that the smocking look like brains.
Final
Top View (Atomic Structure of Polonium)
