For our final project in Design Studio, “Fashion Anthropology and Directive Spontaneity,” we were randomly assigned a historical garment to research. I was assigned the little black dress, which surprisingly for me, was not so straight forward. Through my studies, I realized than any dress that is black can be considered an LBD. So when we had to make a mock-up of some sort of our garment’s most characteristic part, I was a little stumped. In the end, I decided to recreate the front bodice of Audrey Hepburn’s classic Givenchy dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, because to me, that is the little black dress.

To go along with our historical garment, we were also assigned a random action word. With this word, combined with our garment, were were supposed to design a collection. My word was birth. Yes, birth. So after some thought, I started focusing on Immaculate Conception and the birth of the Virgin Mary, which seemed like a fitting contradiction to the mischievous LBD.

For my fabric manipulations, I used motifs from the depictions of Immaculate Conception. The Virgin Mary often has a halo of stars or is standing above thorns, so I laser cut both from fabric. I also used bleach to take the color out of black fabric.

To me, it was like bad vs. good. Born free from original sin vs. the sin that the color black represents. This idea remained strong as I designed my collection, and I incorporated the idea of that struggle as well as my fabric manipulations into each of the looks.