By Ellen Brewster
My gran asked me why fashion has become ‘weird’. Of course, she was referring to
someone who had just passed us, walking down our local high street wearing a
plastic-looking green garment with various holes showing her ribs. I told her that
fashion is no longer about usability but artistry and pushing boundaries. And
sometimes, that means it’s ‘weird’. She told me it looked cold, and I agreed, but it’s
not always about that.
Fashion as an art form can be viewed and consumed within conventional artistic
boundaries alongside its rich classical history. On the surface, fashion holds together
institutions and is woven literally into the fabric of society. This gives wiggle room for
individual artists, designers, and creatives to question fashion norms; typicality can
be reframed and distorted.
Embracing atypicality has become typical. Creativity is the new convention. I mean,
what does it mean for something to be a dress or a shirt? For something to be a
textile or a fabric? These terms no longer frame a singular material, a weave style or
design. The materials encompass various modes and models that can together
represent a garment with no singular identity. Freedom of misclassification and
widening boundaries allow for creative modes to be pushed.
If societal modes can be reimagined and delineated, why can it not happen in the
fashion industry? Interdisciplinary discovery stands at the forefront of contemporary
fashion and its design. The material and its movement, as well as the process
behind it, embody fashion as a movement, an act, and a process not defined by a
final product. Fashion weeks, walks and galas draw the attention of the fashion
industry. We see products being developed and interpreted as a complete act rather
than a picture-perfect garment on a static body.
The rewriting of fashion is here, and here are the headliners:
Cameron Hughes
Now immensely popular on social media, Hughes incorporates engineering to
produce outstanding technical design pieces. One of his more notable recent pieces
includes the stitch-less laser cut dress worn by Dylan Mulvaney, where she attended
the ‘Wicked’ Premiere in LA. The dress goes against anything seen before. The
question of stitching being central to dress-making leads to further questions
surrounding fashion in general. Similarly, “Blossom” worn by Mulvaney again
confronts the art of combining techniques on face value. The dress used axis servos,
in which ‘petals’ were attached to create a movable skirt.
Gareth Pugh
Pugh’s work first captured my attention when models walked his designs in the
‘Fashion in Motion’ series at the V&A. Like Hughes, Pugh utilises unconventional
materials to create these garments and designs, which blow your mind. The models act like sculptures, their bodies blending into the material. It seems that the future has reached fashion.
Amanda Phelan
Phelan’s work encompasses the idea of movement. The focus is on the aesthetic
value, what we see as consumers of fashion, and how it moves as you wear it. Her
Spring 2016 show highlights this most clearly. The dresses changed depending on
how they were viewed: the most significant was the accordion-knit silver dress that
seemed amour-like, heavy and dense, but from close up, it was clearly lightweight
and held so much movement. Her approach allows for the critical study of textiles
and how the designer can manipulate them to produce a different outcome than the
one assumed. Can textiles have dual meanings in just one material?
Many more artists have manipulated the fashion industry, but these are the ones that
caught my eye. Whilst they all produce completely different products, they cohesively
allow fashion questioning. It pushes the boundaries and shapes the future.
Surround Sound 
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