A question that puzzles me as I am coming into my independence; Am I seeing things as they really are, or do I see things as I wish them to be?
Looking at human history, it's almost unsettling to see how much we have evolved. Thousands of years ago the key to survival would have primarily been about obtaining food, finding shelter and reproducing. Today the key to our survival is drastically more complex than that. In the modern world competing against 9 billion others makes survival less about the basic needs and finds its true place in gaining wealth, a high social status and fulfilling pleasures.
Fashion, in its form of expression, is a way of active communication. As a designer breaking through to the world is one of the many drivers behind why I create. I believe that our advances in evolution have taken us further away from obtaining the true essence of an honest life and through my thesis I have attempted to raise this awareness of the psychological chase to succeed; a paradox of survival. But how can I communicate something so intangible and transform it into something a body can wear and then call it fashion?
Through my first trials on paper I placed shapes and silhouettes of space over the human body assuming that people have conformed over time in response to their changing surroundings. Going deeper into my research, I have realized that it is not the environment or life around us responsible, it is the perceptions of ourselves where this radical change takes action. Understanding human perception was a start but ultimately, didn’t feel deep enough to realize. In the research that followed I found myself searching for a deeper beginning.
White is symbolism for purity. It is the color of a butterfly's cocoon- a safe haven suspended on a silk thread in a world of danger. It is a space around a soul, inside a growing and changing insect as colorful as one can imagine- something that needs protection. This idea of purity and innocence motivated me to search for fabrics and materials that gave the impression of a safe haven as a reminder of the purity all beings are born with.
Following, I began looking at behavioral patterns in people who climb their way up to the top. What drives them? For example, a man who chases the American Dream, is chasing an enigma. He wears a tailored suit, works in finance and owns promising stocks and dozens of beautiful cars. He, like many others, has tragically overestimated how long his investments will keep him satisfied. He has grown into the pattern of buying more and more until a lifetime later he realizes that all of his possessions did not make up for the debt accumulated. The American man introduced construction and tailoring into my collection as a reminder that money and greed is a vicious and impenetrable cycle of chronic dissatisfaction.
But a good designer communicates through the heart- through personal experiences. I ended my collection reflecting on my own upbringing in Los Angeles, California. There I grew up to accept that being a woman meant being beautiful and I would have to invest a great fortune in staying young, perfect and worthy. I would be a woman who chases her youth, goes under the knife 3 times a year, maintains an attractive and sexual presence on social media and believes that my worth is only what I invest in my physical appearance and the perception that others have of me. This kind of woman is the antithesis of less is more and can only see things as she wishes to see them. My upbringing as a young girl introduced knitted and stretched nylon into the collection as a reminder that at some point even beautiful things will tear if they've been stretched to exhaustion.
