It’s Good Friday morning, and while the rest of the city
plans a lazy day, the NSCAD fashion studios hum with the sound of
sewing machines, music and laughter. Sunlight streams through the large
windows, casting a shine on duct-taped body forms, or Judys, as they’re
called.
Students are preparing for NSCAD University’s 19th Wearable Art
Show, on April 22. The annual spectacle, which raises funds for the
AIDS Coalition of Nova Scotia, brings together students from all
disciplines—as long as a piece can be worn on a human body, anything
goes. Since its inception, the show has become a much-anticipated
showcase for crazy sculptural forms, unusual materials, outrageous
performances and, yes, occasional nudity. But as the university’s
fashion program grows, the event has also put the spotlight on the
talents toiling in the Granville-facing studio.
This year’s show was supposed to be at the Marquee again, but with
that club closing and reopening as The Paragon Theatre, student
organizers Bree Mackin and Sarah Roy felt that it was time to move.
“It’s hard being in a bar,” says Roy. “Some garments are put
together with staples and some people use silk.” The new Port Campus
isn’t big enough for this non-juried event; they would have to turn
students away. So, Mackin and Roy decided to throw a big “outdoor
wearable-art block party” in Granville Mall.
“Granville Mall is pretty much the heart of NSCAD. It’s just an
extension of the campus and it’s such a beautiful street—it brings it
back to grassroots of the school,” says Roy. “There’s always really
exciting work and we felt that this location echoed that.” And, as
Mackin points out, with NSCAD’s downtown campus tucked away in historic
buildings, some Haligonians don’t even know where the school is
located.
The show will be held in the north section of the pedestrian-only
mall, covered by a 60′ by 40′ canopied tent, with a runway parting down
the middle. Although it’ll probably be warm under there, thanks to all
the lights and bodies, the organizers caution people to dress
comfortably. And if you need a break, Peddler’s Pub is open exclusively
to ticket holders, with a live feed so you won’t miss a thing. Like
Nocturne, last October’s wildly successful late-night arts festival,
surrounding businesses will stay open for the duration of the show.
Mackin and Roy, both fashion and textile students, are not just the
organizers and frequent collaborators, they also have work in the show
and are planning to launch a line of party dresses together, hopefully
in time for the next Atlantic Fashion Week in October. One of Mackin’s
dresses is created from a used painting drop-cloth, which she
hand-crotcheted together with an old lace curtain. It’s deceivingly
heavy for such a pretty dress with a flirty shape that would fit into a
Betsey Johnson collection. Roy is busy working on reconstructing a
gorgeous bustier Madonna would be proud to own, which she embellishes
with thread, paint and other details.
This holistic philosophy of reuse and reconstruction is prevalent
among Wearable Art participants, and not just those in the fashion
department. Many of them credit assistant professor Gary Markle, and a
class called FFF, or Fiber, Fabric, Fashion, taught by Toshiko Horiuchi
MacAdam. Mackin says MacAdam “brings you back to the basics of what is
clothing—not what you want it to look like, or the newest trends,
it’s head to toe. To cover yourself, help your body love it. Not
everything in the store is made for everyone’s body.”
Arianne Pollet-Brannen is anti-fashion in her process. She
dismantles used shoes and turns them into patchworked leather bras,
headpieces and other wearable sculptures. When two models try them on,
along with raw cotton skirts created from strips of fashion-studio
remnants, they instantly become feminist warriors from a long-lost
tribe, roaming around the room.
Pollet-Brannen became fascinated with feet during anatomy drawing
classes. She drew them over and over, studied the structure of bound
feet, examining footwear closer. “I thought I would go up the body, but
I got stuck at the feet,” she says. First she painted shoes, but then
started taking them apart. “I’ll start with some form that I
like—I’ll place it on a mannequin and work around it—it’s really
like collage.”
A single pair of Irish brogues became a leather bra. Pollet-Brannen
doesn’t cut into the leather; she uses pieces from the manufacturing
process, punching holes to make the fit adjustable, and hand-stitching
everything. She also works with wooden shoes—a nod to her former
Belgian home—and paint-ed and stitched reclaimed fabric pieces
referencing personal and provocative messages.
Personal identity is reflected throughout the studio. Louanna
Murphy’s small collection is inspired by her semester in Australia. “I
was struggling to get back into the Nova Scotia lifestyle and I was
holding on to those memories,” she says. Her four dresses and
accompanying dramatic feathered hats are based on exotic birds. “I pull
colours and silhouettes,” she says, from feathered friends like the
crimson rosella. She designed a red dress reflecting that bird’s
plumage, worn underneath a leather jacket (he’s a “bad ass”)
constructed from kids’ trench coats. A shot of bright blue, mimicking
the bird’s blue tail and wings, peeks out from slits in the sleeves.
The crimson finch is “chubby and cute,” so it gets a big, voluminous
red skirt.
Chloé Gordon, whose dramatic and on-trend feather earrings
sell at Clothes Horse, has created pieces for her “simple, chic” dress
collection that are influenced by ethnic patterns. She uses traditional
techniques like ikat (a type of resist-dye done before the threads are
woven into a pattern) and shibori (a beautiful Japanese version of
tie-dye), and dresses them with skinny, studded-metal leather belts.
She says her sister is also a huge influence: “She makes jewellery and
she’s super into metal, so we’re trying to find ways to blend and work
together. I like nature and culture, she likes industrial.”
For a project in her FFF class, ceramic student Lauren Levine was
asked to invent a culture, and create clothing for it. Her body-moulded
dress was constructed out of brightly painted plastic vinyl that looks
like it popped out of Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti series. Although her
imagined people are poor, they still have orange juice (thanks, Mr.
Tropicana), which sloshes, encased inside plastic necklaces and
bracelets.
Over in the quiet advanced fashion studio, three artists keep
focused. Mandy Moira is head down, adding intricate beadwork to four
dresses representing the different elements of nature. Siân
Morris Ross, whose background is in film costume design, is working on
her Truck Stop Brides (not what you think): An exploration of both the
devastating petroleum industry and wedding culture—“both things
being, I thought, dealt with in a trivial sort of way”—Ross has
created futuristic wedding suits out of quilted white cotton. The
quilted veils eerily cover the entire head like welders’ masks, and the
suits look like they could double for dog-obedience training uniforms.
“They’re homespun and delicate and yet so industrial,” she says.
Textile student Alison Seary is taking a very Grimm approach to her
Red Riding Hood-inspired art. Her handwoven garments, which Seary
refers to as having “cultivated coarseness,” are both texturally
dramatic and beautiful: The hunter wears a felted wolf-head trophy
scarf, the wolf has real rabbit fur, salvaged from an old fur coat,
woven into its material and Red Riding Hood’s cape would look amazing
with a pair of tall boots.
You can’t escape “eco-fashion” in magazines right now, but
Roy says that at NSCAD, the fashion department insists this is not a
trend, but “a lifestyle and a practice.”
Even lingerie can be designed with less waste. Kathy Marsh’s black
and mint-green bra, underwear and onesie may have a vintage-inspired
colour palette, but her reuse of straps and other parts is modern. Her
dark-haired model is a Mad Men dream in silk cotton and jersey,
and stretchy lace.
At the last Atlantic Fashion Week, Danica Anastasia Olders’ dresses
drew applause from the crowd for their flapper-esque glamour and
materials: One was made from used receipts with melted plastic-bag
straps, another was designed from flattened beer caps pounded out to
create a diamond-patterned fabric of golden medallions.
Olders, in her second year studying textiles and fashion studies,
says she had a “vision to use anything that I could—plastic bags,
newspaper scraps, containers.” The beer-cap dress will be her
show-stopping piece in the Wearable Art Show, but she’s also designed
six new dresses based on simplistic 1920s cuts, reflecting her interest
“in the era and the development of the teenager as a person in
society.” Olders is critical of the “1920s wastefulness and how no one
really cared about what they were doing,” contrasted with “my own
spiritual world and the kind of place I wish we could live in.”
Although another model will wear her dress in the show, Olders puts
on her beer-cap dress for our photo shoot. It makes a sound like
tinkling rain on a metal surface. Shyly, as her make-up is being
finished, she laughs, “It’s been surprising that this dress would get
me to where I am now.”
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.