Initial sketches:
Photoshoot 1: “My Unhealthy Relationship With Food”
Photoshoot 2: “A Mental Battle”
My personal battle and relationship towards this project (Artist statement)
Throughout the process of crafting and designing this garment, it took me on various emotional rollercoaster rides. This was not just a freshman year design project to me, this garment represented the most tormented part of my middle/high school life. Anorexia was an everyday battle with myself and between my body and my brain. It’s a period of time where I completely ignored what my body wanted and instead, allowed everyone else to dictate the way I looked. It can begin with the littlest thing, in my case, it all began when my good friend told me I got a little chubby over the summer. This little comment quickly escalated to my paranoia; thinking everyone thought I was fat, even if they squeezed my cheeks; the mere fact that I had fat on my cheeks for people to squeeze freaked me out. Mirror and weight scale visits started becoming more and more frequent. Wake up, look in the mirror, check my weight, write it down. This soon became my new routine and before I knew it, I’ve lost around 30 lbs. It was never enough. What I saw in the mirror was never what everyone else saw. When my friends and family told me I looked skinny, I fed off these comments like a parasite because I’ve achieved what I wanted. However, I myself never felt absolutely satisfied. I wanted the thigh gap to be wider, I wanted my waist to be tinier, I wanted my jawline to be even more visible. The list goes on.
I created this garment to visualize my thoughts from when I was anorexic. What I remember the most clearly from this period of my life was the non-stop habit of checking the nutrition labels to see if the calorie count exceeded what I considered as “acceptable”. I became an expert on food. I would look at people eating online, read menus as if reading a book, watch people eat, bake cakes for everyone around me, browse fast food restaurants; food was the primary focus in my life. I would do everything related to food instead of ACTUALLY consuming it. I wanted to portray 2 primary feelings I experienced when I was anorexic. The feeling of bloating and paranoia. The knit around the waist portrays the state of feeling bloated all the time. I was never hungry, I didn’t eat at all, but I would feel bloated all the time. The nutrition print on the garment portrays my obsession with calories. I enjoyed the difference in texture of the cotton versus the heavy weight wool. I created the wool in the style of a corset because I wanted to show the feeling of uneasiness and how food dictated my life.
This is an extremely personal project to me and it has helped me feel comfortable enough to speak out against an issue that I feel has been long overlooked and underestimated. I want everyone out there who might be experiencing or have experienced this issue to know that there is hope and that no one is or should be going through this alone.
