Art to Wear

This is the cover of the brochure I just did for the publication design class. There's meant to be a die-cut hole that you look through to the picture of the dress. The next page that you see as you unfold the brochure is the title, Art to Wear. Then the inside of the brochure, which has the dresses.

I drew these dresses from vintage pattern designs and dresses, most of which I saw over at Dressaday. The designs are meant to simulate hand-painted and hand-dyed patterns, and I wanted to try out large scale patterns. I love the effect, especially the way the flower hugs the waist of the yellow-green dress. You'd never know that that and the black and red-violet above are the same pattern. What I used to give the effect of large hand-painted designs were the virtual batiks I showed below, used at a large scale compared to the size of the dresses.

The blank rectangle in the frame on the left side of the image is meant to be the die-cut hole, so there's nothing in the frame from that side.

The colors of this project are way outside my original comfort range, and I love them together. The color theory teacher was right; it's possible to use any colors and make them look good. And she was right that our use of colors would expand. I have some clothes that I never wore much, because they weren't my favorite colors, but just off. I thought I might try overdyeing them, but that's always a risk; one can easily ruin the garment. Now my color preferences are expanding, and I think I will just wear them and enjoy them. I have them because I liked the style in the first place.

And I love the effect of the large-scale patterns in this project so much that I think I'm going to have to design and dye some for real.

There's a great discussion over at Dressaday today: You don't have to be Pretty. Two of Erin's comments that I liked the most are: Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked "female". and I'm not saying that you SHOULDN'T be pretty if you want to. (You don't owe UN-prettiness to feminism, in other words.)

Some of my thoughts on that subject were: "I have come to think of clothing as an art form mostly unconnected to the appearance of the person serving as the dress form inside it. This is very liberating as a personal dressing philosophy." and "it's all costume. We can choose what message we send, and choose it differently each day. It does not define us, unless we let it."

There were lots of interesting comments on this too. I think I'll have to write about it more soon, maybe tomorrow.