The Two Leaves Art Blog: Fashion

FASHION

I've always loved flicking through a fat glossy magazine admiring the fashion photography, the clothes, the make-up and the setting. However I've never really know what to do with any of it. It's been too out of my league, a different world and one I don't feel I'm invited into anyway. I see the beauty and luxury of it all but first and foremost what I used to see was a skinny girl. That and clothes exclusive to size zero models and at a price I would never be able to afford. However this changed...

I used to work as a display assistant at Harvey Nichols, one of the leading window designers in the fashion world. The store sells high end luxury fashion brand such as Lanvin and Stella McCartney. When I started my job there I did some research into the fashion industry, specifically the designers behind the clothes. I watched a documentary on the American designer Mark Jacobs and I watched fashion shows by the British designer Alexander McQueen. These two fashion designers are true artists. They use their inspiration and emotions to create their clothes. They don’t see the clothes the way I did, they see them the way I see theatre – as an outlet to design and a way to physicalize their creativity “I don’t think the world needs reality. It needs fantasy. There is enough reality in the world.”

Alexander McQueen uses the runway as a theatre space. He starts his collection by deciding on a theme for the entire show. He then designs the clothes and then designs how the clothes will be modelled. His runway shows could be described as works of Theatre of Cruelty. Theatre of Cruelty is a form of theatre that originated in the 1930s by Antonin Artaud; it tries to show its audience the things that they ignore by affecting them emotionally and physically. It's name is not supposed to imply cruelty on stage but rather to show the cruelties of life.

In researching Theatre of Cruelty I developed an idea for ‘Ultimate Theatre’ . A theatre that makes you feel the way you might do in a situation where life and death are impending by creating adrenaline in the audience and cast. In one of Alexander McQueen's shows, he dressed his models in bandages and staged the show inside a glass cube. At the end of the show a smaller cube inside the large one opened and shattered to reveal an overweight woman hooked up to a hospital breathing apparatus while moths flew out from within their glass prison. McQueen wanted to make a statement about accepting what life is in the end, that life isn't perfect, we are all damaged and don’t look model perfect.

Mark Jacobs is famous for introducing grunge to the fashion scene. He has an obsession with contrasting rich and poor, ugly and beautiful and is a designer who is extremely stylish and un-pretentious. He is again a true artist in the sense that he creates from feeling. He feeds on fashion, music, art and daily encounters and it is in all these places that he gets his inspiration for his clothes. “I don’t have a separation between life and work…I don’t know how to define success. If I can continue doing what I love then I’m successful”.

JW Anderson is another Designer who designs emotionally: “I based one collection on somebody who completely screwed me about- and it was the collection I loved the most; it all meant something. I designed completely emotionally. I don’t hide from any of it”.