LCF23: Visualisation of de-anthropocentrism with Mo Xie

What made you decide in building layers and creating a voluminous silhouette in your garment pieces?

I prefer to visually present what I observe and what I try to do. The multi-layered structure of the garments comes from the newspaper itself. The voluminous silhouettes come from my observations in the tube and the conceptual prototypes I made based around this.

I shaped each look as an object which enabled me to play around with the proportions and make them very exaggerated within my designs quite freely, so long as they are within the framework of my research and design logic. When I explored these proportions through collage, I found that the structures and silhouettes created an atmosphere that was mysterious, isolated, and ritualistic. This is what I want to present in my collection.

What particular challenges have you faced during the production of your final showcase and how did you overcome them? Please state any processes, trial, and errors.

One of the biggest challenges I faced during my final Masters collection was using Tyvek and the use of patterns. Tyvek is the main fabric I used for the collection the papery texture and touch is one of the reasons why I chose it.

For me, the sensory experience of reading print media is both important and unique, so during my research I was looking for a fabric with a similar texture and tactile feel to paper to fit what I was discussing in my project. I finally chose Tyvek. The use of Tyvek allows my garments to make a dynamic sound of paper rubbing together, like the sound of turning a book. Compared to newspaper, Tyvek is obviously less fragile, but it creates irreversible folds. I use these garments made from Tyvek as an object to record traces, which will become more wrinkled and even broken over time. I hope that when people feel these wrinkles in their hands, it will trigger memories of reading print media.

Due to the wide variety of the material I needed to constantly adjust the way I sewed to fit the different coatings of Tyvek. I needed to respectively take notes of the stitch length, foot choice etc. At the same time, Tyvek itself has almost no stretch, which resulted in long discussions between myself and my machinist trying to solve the problem together during the manufacturing process.

The pattern is also very special in this collection. Some of the items, such as the mutant bomber jacket and a few of the baggy jeans, have a very irregular patterned shape which meant that whenever there was a structure that needed to be modified, I had to modify almost every piece of the pattern. It's a painful process, frankly. During that time, I needed to amend the pattern at least one garment every day, cutting the fabric in advance and getting it ready for the next day's toile sewing. Personally, the only way to overcome this problem is to work efficiently and intensely, it sounds straightforward, but it does work.