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" ?