For our final project, our teacher challenged us to be more conceptual, and to stop thinking so much about the form of the body. For this, I was inspired by clouds. I thought about how when people are looking up at them, they see different shapes. One may look like a cat or a baby, or a cake. Really, the clouds are just big blobs, not looking like anything, but people see what they want in them. I wanted to make a dress that people could see in it what they wanted to, and transform it to wear how they wanted to. I did this by incorporation drawstrings, two in the front and one in the back, so that the dress can be worn in at least ten different ways.

We started our shirt project by deconstructing a men’s button down shirt. From this, I took my initial inspiration, which was a cape-like back made up of two layers.

From there, I thought more about shirts, and started researching the traditional Hawaiian shirt. Through this research, I learned about the amazing things Hawaiians have made through traditional feather working, such as leis and this cape, which belonged to a king:

In the end, this was my finished product: