Jersey Devil

I believe that this was the first fashion piece I had created for my senior thesis. After watching films such as Planet of the Apes and The Time Machine, I have had this idea of making a colorful high fashion beast. That being said, I dug into my fabric bin, and I had these amazing faux fur fabrics in black and electric blue. Together, I thought the colors were perfect. Ideally, I would have also had a neon pink faux fur, but sadly I could not find any.



Since the fabric is quite loud and unconventional, I wanted to keep the structure of the piece as simple as possible. Luckily, 60's mod is my ideal design aesthetic, so I had no trouble creating a simple shape. The biggest challenge I faced in makin this was actually putting in the zipper. At first, I wanted the zipper to be hidden for a clean look. It's not often we see beast like creatures with zippers in their backs. However, because we are dealing with faux fur, which is a very three dimensional & textural fabric, often the furry strands would get caught in the zipper, making it difficult to serve its function. My solution to this design flaw was to use a blue zipper so it could blend with the blue fur.



Finally came the photo shoot, which took place a few months after making this outfit. I was quite excited about this shoot because the outfit is so crazy, you can really get away with anything in the photo shoot. However, I wanted to allow the environment of the shoot to stay true to the design concept so that way everything came together and created a visual story. The "story" is that you the viewer were walking thru the woods one night armed with nothing but a flash light. Suddenly your light flashes on this stark high fashion beast in it's cave home made out of sticks. To achieve this flash light effect, I shot my model at night time and used the camera flash.

In the end, I wanted to create a very dark shoot. I wanted to fuse horror + fashion (my two favorite things in this workd). Who says the "Beast" can't be the "Beauty" ?

Pixilated Invasion

Doing my senior art thesis has been quite a challenge because I have endless ideas with limited time. For a while now I have been toying around the concept of pixils and how I can create a computer pixil inspired design. Pixels basically are these little squares of color that make up an image, so I really took off with this repetition of these structured shapes and morphed them into a high contrast fashion piece. I wanted to make fabric "pixels" that would come together to make a bold outfit.



What I love is that the outfit is very three dimensional, and offers much movement. When the wind blows these fabric strips the dress takes on a brand new shape, similar to how pixils move around to create new colors, shapes, and images. What I believe is the strongest design factor of the dress is my bold color contrast between the black strips and the electric green strips, giving this dress a sci-fi color element.



The dress was quite simple to make, but very time consuming. I had to make each individual strip, sew it, iron it, fold it inside out, iron it again, pin it on the form, and finally sew each of them onto the "bones" of the outfit. Though I had many all nighters in the studio, I am pleased with the end product. My only critique of the piece is that it is a little bit on the short side, and I don't really agree with how I executed the neck line.



Finally, I had the photoshoot, which was a blast. The concept of the shoot was to show off this sculptural outfit in a futuristic setting with a lot of sharp angles and industrial materials. I found the perfect location for the shoot, which was at the base of a water towar near my school. The location had such an ovewhelming presence, almost as if I was on an entirely different planet. It was a pleasure to shoot at such a location.



In the end, the shoot went really well. My model, Joy Kelsh, a friend of mine and an excellent artist, really took direction well, and really understood the concept of not only the shoot, but the dress as well.