Sally

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ADN 470 - Fibers & Surface Design Studio
Spring 2022

Professor: Adrienne McKenzie
Models: Karuna Gangwani, Madison Smith, Lacie Thomas

This is a small wearable collection meant to visualize a shift from reality to unreality, wherein flat graphic patterns and simple silhouettes represent a grounded element that is tethered to reality, while a devolution into unreality manifests in richer textures and more exaggerated silhouettes.

Inspiration and Initial Planning

At the start of this project, I centered my ideas around a prompt of “dissonance,” which to me invoked ideas of dissonant realities. I tied this to a small stroke my mother had awhile back, which sparked the discussion of dissonant realities in a sensory manner—descriptions of my mother's visual recollections: seeing more than two of her hands in front of her, the brick tiles receding from below her feet, and waves of colors swirling at the edges of her vision. These became strong inspirations behind the motifs I chose to drive the collection forward.

After multiple ideation sessions which left me more frustrated than motivated, I decided to shift the focus of the collection away from a direct personal narrative and instead towards a more abstract concept still based in my mother’s experience—the collection is still titled in her name.

Process Work

Patterning

I've never had experience in measuring models, creating patterns, or making/fitting toiles before, so I learned a lot through this studio in terms of methods for going about all of this. I found out that making pant slopers and flat patterning pants was much easier than I'd anticipated, but also that draping bodices and drafting sleeves to set in was a bigger task. I also learned how to work with interfacing in order to pattern the pointed-hip pants.

Bleach Printing

My plan for screen printing graphic elements in the beginning was to use bleach instead of traditional ink in order to have the light color pop on dark fabric, as well as to utilize the materiality of bleach as a subtractive element to further the concept of a devolution, a sort of breaking down and away, from reality. After a lot of testing on different fabric types using different concentrations and viscosities of bleach (undiluted liquid—bled and lost clarity, cornstarch/water gel mixture—cornstarch created film keeping bleach from soaking into fabric, toilet cleaner gel—ate through screen emulsion and did not affect fabric), I concluded that bleach wasn't going to give me the results I'd hoped for, so I switched gears and began testing with traditional screen print ink.

Pointed-hip pant toile

Some of many, many toile samples

A pile of pattern piece samples

Pointed-hip pant toile

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A few of many failed bleach tests

Bleach soaked swatch test

A few of many failed bleach tests

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Traditional Printing

Using traditional screen print ink with concentrated dyes of light colors allowed the graphics to stand out against dark fabrics in the way I had envisioned in my original conception. I was disappointed that I'd have to compromise the subtractive quality of bleaching fabrics, but was satisfied with the quality of prints when using the traditional ink. Since I wanted a highly defined realistic hand as my graphic focus, I edited a photo of my model's arm, half-toning it for definition and inverting colors so that the light ink printed would show highlights, while shadows would be created by the unprinted areas of the dark fabric (an inverse example of this is shown on right). Printing involved precision in aligning the screen to the fabric in order to achieve the accurate patterning I intended.

A few hand silkscreens

Negatives for burning into screens

Hand print stretch catsuit

A few hand silkscreens

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Fabric Manipulation

Inspired by textures in shrink-wrapped and bubbled plastics, I wanted layers of textured sheer fabrics to symbolize a distortion of reality, inspired by my mother's descriptions of ripples of color and light at the edges of her vision after her stroke. I used a heat gun on different types of plastics and synthetic chiffons, which gave me interesting effects in terms of organic wrinkles, puckers, and bubbles in the materials.