Collage

In my curiosity journal the concepts of shape, men’s clothing, textures, unconventional materials, and street, were dominent. So I decided to combine these interests and turn them into an unconventional piece of clothing.

I molded an actual 2nd hand vest with layers and layers of tape, to create a new inventive garment. I tried to challenge myself in a way that tape is an extremely difficult material to work with. Everything can stick together and create a great mess. Plastic isn’t a manuable material. So I needed to do parts by parts, the way I learned when I took molding lessons before at La Chambre Syndicale de la Couture. Even though, I don’t think I would be able to make it work. Molding a vest was kind of the same process as molding on a stockman. But It wasn’t concretely molding a body, but directely an existing piece of clothing, which I found really interesting. I discovered the perfect vest that I was looking for in a thrift shop. Really bold shouders, it is how I like something to feet on my body. By molding the vest I was sure to obtain its exact same shape.

The garment is « fragile » in two ways :

  • The garment is concretely fragile because the tape first function is assembling or glewing elements (obviously not to do clothes). I wanted to use this unconventional material because I have always been interested in findings on the street, that I can recycle as some kind of fabrics of accessoiries…
  • My vest directely refers to the gender type of issue, which interests me a lot. Nowadays, I see a lot of « androgyny », ambiguous « gender representations », on runways nowadays, or sometimes on the street. People assume more and more their personality. Lots of women are wearing men pieces, and sometimes men wears woman pieces like dresses or skirts. The fact that it a girl wears a bold man jacket was chocking few years ago. I wanted to reverse the sens of the stereotyped “fragile” woman, paradoxaly using “FRAGILE” tape. I have never pushed that far this passion of unconventional materials to create a finished garment.

 

I decided to push my message a bit more by echanging the side of the bottons, from right to left. While men’s shirts have buttons on the right side, the opposite is true for women’s blousesor vests. This difference would have been established during the seventeenth century. This would be linked to the fact that, in the past, women of a certain status, who wore buttoned clothing, were most often helped by maids to get dressed. It was therefore easier for these housewives, mostly right-handed like the rest of the population, to have the buttons positioned to their right when they were facing their mistress. On the other hand, the buttons are located on the other side for men because they were dressed most often alone. In fact, the valets only intervened to prepare the clothes and the final ornaments.

Sketches / Initial Ideas :

 

 

 

Process :

 

Set up :

Final Result :

 

 

Leave a reply

Skip to toolbar