Annelies Henny and Hannah Sullivan

With Force and Noise (teaser) from hannah on Vimeo.

The images above are from an embroidered costume created in collaboration between performance artist Hannah Sullivan and costume designer Annelies Henny for a performance called 'With Force and Noise'. Hannah has been researching and exploring the emotion 'anger' and has come to understand it as a combination of biological motivation and a socially complex entity.
Anger is an emotion that is bound up with our perceptions of madness and often dismissed but it is a powerful force, a strong often ugly part of  our humanity, too often neglected, behind more socially palatable emotions like fear and love.
Through working with ideas for the costume Hannah found herself suddenly in a world of craft.

"I was led to a world of craft and textile that opened a whole new angle on the emotion of anger. This angle is that anger motivates us to make something visible or witnessed, a possible route for this is what I am calling radical craft." Hannah Sullivan

                                         Image above:Jack Offord

"Hannah came to me with lots of research around anger and we worked together in the studio translating it into a costume, then Hannah did lots of drawing and I translated that into embroidery... " Annelies Henny

George Duan

Sometimes fashion is made by the accessories and I think these shoes by product designer George Duan are fantastic.

"An experimental shoe created using a CNC machine. I wanted to make a wooden sole for a shoe that has a very complex form. I also CNC an aluminum mold for the rubber pad modeling. The wooden sole is a piece maple cut with Tormach." George Duan

Fabrics and how they rot, or not.

I am working on a series of posters about plastic pollution of our beaches, seas and oceans.
I used to like finding fabric items on the beach and if they were attractive enough using them in textile illustrations. They were chance discoveries of someone else's history, a little like archeology and I liked to weave them back into the 'fabric of life' by making them key parts of my work.

However lately, I have been finding a lot of plastic gloves, garments and shoes that are man made and do not biodegrade. As I find greater quantities of them, I am realising the incredible damage that these cheap engineered synthetic fabrics are having on our environment and thus on our water and food.
This is bad enough, but then I find that research is being conducted on the vast amounts of microscopic filaments that these garments release just through being washed which are then ingested along our coasts by sea creatures. These tiny fibers cannot be gathered in a beach clean these are infecting our world at a microscopic level that is impossible to fix.

Solution, don't buy man-made fibers buy organic cotton, linen, flax and wool.
Stop the rot by buying fabrics that do rot.

Animated Fashion

A whole mini-drama shot in stop motion using only clothing. This is Shiny made by  Daniel 'Cloud' Campos  an award-winning Los Angeles-based dancer, director, and actor with Spencer Susser a film direct and screenwriter. 

Robert Wun II

Robert Wun's AW 2016 collection 'Rosary' has a wonderful softness about the fabric manipulation with enveloping, voluminous soft pleated forms. The photography by Nhu Xuan Hua perfectly reveals the full design dramatically highlighting the great shapes and design of the rear elevation. The diffused tone of Roberts monochrome designs cleverly play tricks on the eyes and alter the perceived volume and silhouette.

Celia Meirelles

There is a wonder and joy at shaping and constructing scraps of thread and fabric into characters maybe it should be called 'Pinocchio syndrome' for you do feel that you are making a life.

Brazilian artist Celia Meirelles does this creating salty sea dogs from the curl of their beard to the turn of their boot or the catch of the day, each sailor carries a history.

Yoni Lefevre

Yoni Lefevre has through an incredible project challenged our view of grandparents by interpreting them through their grandchildren's eyes and creating costumes based on this vision.
Yoni visited a primary school and asked the pupils to draw their grandparents. She then selected the drawings =of four children aged 10 - 11 years.  Yoni Lefevre explains that unlike the majority of the population, children do not see their grandparents as gray and "dried", but as a happy, full of life, people with passions, who make life colorful.