Isabella Smith

Once the epicentre of 1920s hedonism, the Hotel Provencal in the south of France now stands abandoned, an echoing empty shell. It was this image of the veneer of glamour being stripped back and its beauty ripped bare that made me want to explore the distortion of glamour and question how relevant it is today.

This collection forms a dialogue between our garments and ourselves, how they act as both a 'projection of the self' and a 'protective shell'. Influenced by the images of Cecil Beaton's glittering portraits of the Bright Young Things in the 1920s, I merged these with those of John Chamberlain's gleaming metal sculptures made from used car parts to contrast traditional shine surfaces such as silks and satins with more industrial gleaming surfaces. This helped me create the idea of a garment or person being encased, almost as if they had merged with the glistening cellophane background of a Cecil Beaton photograph, forming a tension between hard and shell-like surfaces.

This inspired me to work with metal, seeking to echo the forms of rich folds of fabric and explore how it relates to the body whilst taking the car as an iconic symbol of glamour and warping it. I combined this with glittering broken resin to create the illusion of figures emerging from a twisting metal shell, as in JG Ballard's 'Crash', where he describes one of the protagonists as 'sat in the damaged car like a deity occupying a shrine...reborn within the breaking contours of her crushed sports car'.