An Armored Garment: The Design Process

Once again, it all started with our Event! My event was me moving back to New York from Greece and having to endure all these changes and make the transition from perfection to instability.

The idea was to construct a garment out of manipulated paper that would shield or protect the person wearing it from his or her event. This particular concept didn't really pertain to my event because it's more of a transition  than an actual event that happened in the moment. I chose to find inspiration elsewhere. 

I visited the Prada; Schiaparelli, Impossible conversations exhibit at the MET along with the medieval times: Armor exhibit, and the Arts of Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas exhibit.  

The garment that I constructed was a compilation of different concepts, pieces, techniques of construction, shapes, and textures that I found interesting and inspiring from the various exhibits I visited. I made sure to sketch what ever I found interesting and potentially inspiring. Below are various sketches I did from the exhibits.

After figuring out all these sketches and looking at the various photos I took from the Met, I started to draw some rough sketches of what I'd like my garment to look like.  

Once the sketching was sorted, I decided to review my Ideas and pick the design that would be most challenging and most practical under time constraints and limited supplies.

I chose to keep the palette of the garment consistent with the painting that I made earlier so I looked back at my sketchbook at the palette that I recorded and decided on an appropriate color-way for my garment.

My Garment features a Quinacridone Magenta, Kimono styled vest  with a combination of Querky-Yellow and Afrikaans-Violet petals that run delicately down the sides. The torso of my garment is hand stitched together with bright, white thread, and the fringe is affixed to the hem of the vest with rubber cement. The black hem of the garment is attached to the vest with rubber cement as well. All of the paper utilized to construct this garment is painted on using acrylic paints; some having more layers than others.  The actual stitching of the garment was quite tedious, and I had to treat the paper really delicately when making each individual stitch in fear of the paper ripping.
My Garment's purpose is to make the wearer feel protected and noticed; to not conform to society, yet feel secure enough to wear the garment. The torso of the vest is pieced together in an armor-like manner so that wearer feels secure and confident in what they are doing.
Specifically pertaining to my event of transitioning into a new city, the garment provides security, stature, and edge which is what I believe are the necessities in transitioning into something new.