Sunday 4 December 2016

Comme Des Garcons

After creating my Mcqueen inspired bodice made out of clay on the wooden model. Which was themed to fit the female body theme.
I then wanted to try and incorporate other artists and fashion designers, due to Mcqueen's work not letting me develop further due to having the same inspiration. therefore I started to research into artists who adapt or change the human body shape.

I found an artist called Comme Des Garcons who created a garment collection called "lumps and bumps". This collection had the concept around distorting the body shape by adding fabric and padding within the clothing in order to exaggerate certain aspects of the body. This also related back to my crinoline research and how they exaggerate the hip even back in them days within the dresses woman wore.

This research into the artist inspired me to got to a charity shop and pick out clothing in which I could adapt and distort. I wanted to use shoulder pads and wadding to build up the clothing and change the shape. This lead me to develop further, thinking about using the charity clothing, distorting the shape with padding to create a more feminine shape with the use of padded hips and breasts, and then fitting them onto a mans body to give a male a female shape.

This will also show the outcome of how men feel in a woman's body or even clothing. But I feel this fits within my theme of looking at the woman's body and using Alexander Mcqueens inspiration to then search further to find other artists which inspire me as wells.

After thinking of the idea I then developed  further to create a mold of my hips instead of padding. I first used plaster bandage onto my hip bones and smoothed, then let it dry and filled the cast with plaster. After filling I then applied clay onto the areas I wanted to exaggerate (hip bones) this then was covered with latex, then latex and thickener and finally another coats of thickener, latex, and skin colored paint. I then wanted to make it look as realistic  as possible therefore I used lighter coloured paint on the more prominent  areas of the cast.

This was a good idea as the latex mold will fit to my body better as well as exaggerating the hips. I feel that it also relates to the woman's figure. this worked well except for the cast breaking therefore I had two separate pieces to work.