There were three main elements that helped craft our design process: the park’s current athletic culture, natural landscape, and the historical sexual assault. The elasticity of the bottom garment and its matching top, due to the use of a knit fabric, is inspired by the current athletic culture of Central Park, which encourages exercise and outdoor fun (Lowery, Tim. “Sports in Central Park.” Time Out New York, 18 Apr. 2011). Bouldering is a popular sporting activity in Central Park. Therefore, we decided to employ the scene of that activity, the many boulders of the park, for the silhouette of our headpiece. These geographical features were employed in the design, as the silhouette of our headpiece, because they added to social/family life and the athletic culture of the park that gentrified the neighborhood, and therefore represent the power of motivation, money, and time.
The natural landscape of Central Park also inspired our garment. We incorporated natural, and recycled elements of the area, such as leaves, dirt, newspapers, and an umbrella, so that our garment camouflages easily with its surroundings. We did this to portray a hidden model, along with all the issues of the past that she accompanies (the worn garment underneath). The top garment, or headpiece, is meant to prove that today’s recent renovations of the park (Bethesda fountain, volleyball courts, ice skating rinks, pond canoeing) have been so effective that there are little vestiges of its wretched past. Similar to how the leaves of trees provide protection from natural elements (sun, rain, etc), creating a protective structure; the garment acts as an inverted umbrella, protecting the outside world from the corrupting history.
Lastly, the park’s historically violent, and wretched past was incorporated into our garment in order to demonstrate the duality that accompanies time, love, and influence. Central Park was not always the fun and beautiful place it is today. There was a time where you could not feel safe walking in Central Park. Beginning after the Great Depression Central Park became a drug-ridden place with gangs, sexual assaults, and other crimes. Although we know that sexual assault is a difficult subject, it inspired us to show how the crimes, such as the “Preppy Kid Killer,” “Central Park 5,” and “Jogger Case,” in Central Park have occurred and then covered up by the beauty of the park. On April 19, 1989, Trisha Meil was jogging in Central Park at night when a group of teens ganged up on her and when she was later found her clothes were torn off of her and she was bruised. Many sexual assault victims have been found the same as Trisha Meil beaten and bruised, with their clothes torn. The tainted, muddy color of the bottom garment and its shredded qualities were influenced by the sexual assault cases of the mid-20th century and the park’s history of violence and crime, which tainted much of the natural landscape as well as the name of the park. The top garment’s large presence was designed to consume the model, to overtake her defining features and swallow her whole. The model and her ripped outfit, representing the past, is being suffocated underneath the weight, name, renovations, and beauty of the current park. This garment placement also connects to the jogger cases in which women were violently abused and often left to rot in the park (Jamison, Leslie. “Rape, Race and the Jogger.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Aug. 2016), surrounded by nature and consumed by beauty. Similar to how the beauty of the park’s renovations covered up its ugly past, so too did it consume the life from the victims of the Central Park 5, and many other related cases. We used green embroidery thread and slapdash paint techniques with a light brown color to portray body stitches that often accompany assault, and the presence of open wounds, or cold cases, that existed at the time due to the overworked justice department of New York (York, Kevin Baker in New. “’Welcome to Fear City’ – the inside Story of New York’s Civil War, 40 Years On.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 May 2015). Similar to how the fabric is connected through limited seams, so too is the life of the victims affected by augmented sexual assault, gang violence, and drug abuse that plagued the park in the early 20th century. Lastly, the presence of the black painted hands on the pelvic region of the garment is employed to evoke a sense of discomfort in the viewer and wearer. Portrayal of vulnerability evokes discomfort and confusion. There is also the artistic element of juxtaposition at play in the work. The hands caress the sexual reproductive organs of the human body, which are meant to produce life; however, in this case, the “foreign limbs” are removing life/fullness from the subject. This sense of coldness in the garment is further explored in the hardware used to construct the headpiece, the lack of fabric/great presence of holes, and thinness of the fabric used to construct the garment evoke a sense of nudity, which is often associated to the feelings of coldness, vulnerability, and depression which accompany sexual assault, gang violence, drug abuse.
During the construction, we have faced several challenges. First, time was limited. While that factor should have motivated us to work harder, we underestimated the difficulty of the construction process. In our attempts to create the headpiece with braided wires, we quickly learned of the structures instability and struggled over a solution. Tired and frustrated, we turned to our instructor whose suggestion to employ an umbrella to strengthen the structure, was just the advice we needed to take the project on a life of its own. Next, we had to get creative: figuring out how to connect the wires to the umbrella, how to locate/position the face how accurately, how to drape muslin over the wires, how to adhere the leaves to the structure, etc. We think that without a lot of digging and researching about the park, we would never have been able to know about the dark past of Central Park, one of the many symbols of the New York City. With that knowledge and understanding, we went with a garment that was simple in the overall design, yet informative upon examination. When we interviewed the pedestrians in Central Park, few were able to see beneath the surface, thinking it was merely an imitation of nature, and realize that the details hinted at the wretched past. Their reactions confirmed our social statement: modern day’s ability to paint over the past, camouflaging history into our everyday lives. In conclusion, we think that our group was successful in bringing what we have learned into a physical form: a fashion piece. While, we each had our own creative thoughts, our own individual strong points ultimately surfaced.
WORKS CITED
Jamison, Leslie. “Rape, Race and the Jogger.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 25 Aug. 2016
Lowery, Tim. “Sports in Central Park.” Time Out New York, 18 Apr. 2011
York, Kevin Baker in New. “’Welcome to Fear City’ – the inside Story of New York’s Civil War, 40 Years On.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 18 May 2015
