Year 3
Bachelor of Sustainable Fashion Design
My 2024 collection is an attempt to try and synthesize the cultural climate amongst youth cultures, with clothes that may be used as a shield against the world, as an extension and redifinition of the wearer. Designed for, and by, a generation that seems to be anxious about the world and the future, and generally let down by the state of the world in the 21st century, in increasingly unprecedented ways.
I am inspired visually by the idea of people retreating into digital manifestations of reality, fantasy, and the self, in an attempt to gain power over themselves; their image, their character, and by extension, some semblance of power over the physical world.
This generational retreat into the vast media landscape of the internet has, aesthetically, borne an eclectic mix of nostalgia based longing for a time long gone, the fantasy of small, low tech communities, living off the land, nature untouched by industrialisation. Simultaneously, a tech dystopia of massive, smog ridden cities, laser guns and neon lights, and an easily identifiable and blatantly corrupt bureaucracy to wage righteous war against, is an increasingly popular genre of fantasy world to become immersed within.
This unprecedented consumption of media and culture – music, film, art, history, subcultures, has birthed a new kind of visual expression- one of maximalism, eclecticness and appropriation from any and all eras and places, infused with and warped by the form of consumption and the medium; the digital landscape. Art that works with these ideas is known as postdigitalism.
This constant recycling and regeneration of artefacts and ideas is regenerative in nature, mirroring the regenerative practices and technologies that will be utilised in the making of my collection. Through the process of recycling physical materials and drawing design inspirations from a myriad of places, by making something new and positive, I hope to embody this idea through creation and simultaneously represent it conceptually.
With the unprecedented power and encompassing nature of internet media, information cycles have shortened exponentially, with trends lasting hours, aesthetic taste and cultural output ever transient, frenetic and constantly gaining in momentum and complexity. This shizophrenic cacophany of stimula, artefacts and their consumption, has an aesthetic output is that is impossibly broad in scope, unable to truly settle or ever be defined by a true or pure idea, but somehow encompassing everything in the world at once, in hyper-detail and full sincerity.
This aesthetic, and cultural mode of being, that is somehow sincere about everything at once, while being completely hollow at the same time, is impossibly complex to analyse or summarise. Autumn/Winter 2024 ‘Real Life’ is an attempt to capture this mode of complex cultural interfacing, the blend of artefacts from the history, the rediscovery of things forgotten and placed into new contexts and the growing realisation of what the “future” actually looks like.
