Fashion, Bodies & Protection

Fashion Bodies

faShiOn, BOdieS
& PROteCtiOn

Project for Fashion Bodies

The definition of fashion garments from the very beginning is

items that protect human from the environment

rather than beauty or wealthy symbols.

To explore the relationship between fashion and bodies,

We will go through how fashion garments from the past,
at the moment
and in the future
protects us, physically and psycologically.

“I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.”

― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

This project is aiming to create an outerwear garment that is inspired by ideas of how fashion may protect us by way of creating safe spaces for insecure minds and bodies.

As humans living in society, it is more than natural for us to feel insecure about our body images by comparing them to others, and the technologies and social media nowadays do not help that feeling. It is an experience that everyone has had, more or less, to feel insecure about certain body parts of us and psychologically could even exaggerate the flaws in the mirror(which could lead to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD)). In this research, the aim is to find out how fashion garments could affect an insecure mind of body images. With the following scans of sketchbook research, we could come to the conclusion that the relationship between fashion garments and people who feel insecure about their body can be very complicated. Humans have tried to change how they look by fashioning garments such as corsets, Chinese women's binding feet or even braces. The way human beings choose to dress ourselves can strongly affect how we feel about our own body, thereby affecting the body language of ours. Studies also show that insecure people tend to wear darker coloured garments as it could be "less individualising". The same concept also applies to uniforms which people wear and hide their identity in the group. Noticing the fact that people that are insecure about their body images are inclined to wear garments with larger volume, in order to hide what they do not feel comfortable about showing the world. In a way, those garments have created a safe space for the insecure minds of the bodies.To understand the relationship between fashion, bodies and our insecurities, it is also important to realize how much sometime how we dress ourselves can psycologically change us. How we feel decides what we wear, what we wear decides how we look and could even change the body languages.

The relationship between fashion, bodies, body images and insecurities are incredibly intimate. As a protection of our psycology mind, fashion garments are playing an important roll.

“...she was afraid of losing her shape, spreading out, not being able to contain herself any longer, beginning (that would be worst of all) to talk a lot, to tell everybody, to cry.”

― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

DeSign
KeywORDS

PROteCtiOn

LOw SatURatiOn

COlOuR

UnifORm
eXtReme VolUme

Since the aim of the project is to create an outerwear garment that is inspired by ideas of how fashion may protect us by way of creating safe spaces for insecure minds and bodies, the design method of this project starts with using basic suit/uniforms in an extreme volume and experiment with a sketching mannequin, and find shapes of “ insecurity” in the pattern. By styling the oversized suit differently on the mannequin such as replacing the neckhole on a hole on the back block or one of the armhole, or to simply wrap the mannequin with it, the experiment came to shapes that look similar to insecure body languages, as we see in the following scan pages of the process journal.

In one of the shapes of the draping experiment, the body-tied shape led us to the image of a self-hugging body language. Research shows that with self -hugging, a person can release anxiety just as the same effect of a hug from others. Also, in "A Natural History of the senses" by Daine Ackerman, she mentioned that the anxiety-releasing effect does not necessarily need to be performed by another person or even a living thing, but can just simply be the tactile sensation of a piece of cloth wrapping our bodies.

In the same chapter, Ackerman also mentioned the story of David Vetter, a young boy from Texas, lived out in the real world - in a plastic bubble NASA designed for him. Nicknamed "Bubble Boy". It inspired the choice of the fabrication of this design. Neoprene (memory foam) was invented to prevent damage to bodies in outer space. It is soft and yet stiff enough to hold the shape and create a safe space for the body that needs to be protected from insecurity.

The garment comes with several accessories, such as a headpiece that symbolizes protection of the auditory senses and a face mask attached to it to cover the facial expression of anxiety and insecurity. Those pieces are designed to be worn in different ways as the outwear garment itself is also a multi-way garment that can be adapted by the mood of the wearer. The volume of the garment also means that it is for all different body shapes, as we have all experienced feeling insecure about our body images. The garment is designed for whoever wants to stay in the safe space that it provides, for those who need the space for their own once in a while.