Set Project - update on expressionism concept

One of my latest posts was devoted entirely to research on expressionism. I have done a lot of reading and writing to bring it to the point where it is right now. However, my thoughts and conclusions describing my concept for my collection were not the best and I would like to update you on what I am up to right know because my ideas have developed and became more interesting/ related to the actual theme of the project.

I am still very much inspired by expressionism and fauvism. Emotions still will be the center of my interest for this project. However, I have different approach to them after these couple of days of reflection. I have realised with the help of my tutor that, emotions just by themselves are too easy, common theme and that actually every art piece include emotional background I wanted to include in my collection. Therefore, I tried to think differently about them and I came to realisation that expressionism is actually about revealing these emotions, exposing them by the artist, exposing them from the one's inside. Furthermore, emotions hidden behind a barrier, locked inside somebody and trying to escape, to see the outside world can be better theme to show through my clothing. My concept for this collection now, is to create garments that represent emotions hidden inside everyone, that one doesn't want to showcase to the world. Fear, shame, anger etc. Whatever makes people uncomfortable, whatever could possibly be seen as con by others. I might also include good emotions in this collection to keep the balance, to exaggerate the difference between these very different states of human mind. Right now, I am thinking about representing good emotions by including features to my garments that will be outside of them, like colourful fabrics, beautiful shapes. Negative emotions though, will be represent by distortions of garments taking place inside of them, so that they will look less natural, like the disease would be making a damage to them and we could only see minor changes that it does for people. It will be reference to parallel effects that negative emotions kept inside have on people in the long term.

I will use various textured fabrics and their interesting characteristics to represent these different emotions best I can to showcase how they differ from each other. I am thinking of using for example pleats as it is very peculiar fabric. Because this project will require showing the inside of the garments, I will use deconstructed elements in order to create the effect of a damaged, exhausted body and to add aesthetical value to the garments.

Designers that I will research for this project are: Maison Martin Margiela, Issey Miyake, Hannah Stote and more.

Look 34 Westminster University SS 2015 Ready-To-Wear Collection

Sources:

Armstrong, S., 2014. Look 34. [image] Available at: <https://www.vogue.co.uk/shows/spring-summer-2015-ready-to-wear/westminster-university/collection> [Accessed 31 January 2021].