In this project, clothing is the tool I use to construct an inefficient retail model that operates through the manipulation of a fragmented garment system. With clothing as the vehicle, this project employs a model of critical entrepreneurism. I hope each experience with this system, which is crafted to challenge the existing models of fast fashion and consumption, reflects an individual's specific values of comfort, desire, and luxury. Therefore, inefficiency is a key component of the project; I make a complex retail experience that slows the indifferent momentum of the client by offering an exchange of information and knowledge.

My thesis project “Fair Fit” was the second in a series of ongoing explorations of participatory garment production models. As a fashion designer, I am always being asked to make things fit a certain way, or critiqued as to why they don’t. In response to this problem, I turned the responsibility of fit over to the client, as a way allow her more freedom to represent her body through a garment in ways she determines to be functional and comfortable. The Fair Fit dress is democratic, its design is equitable and expansive. The classic princess seam style line, a staple of garment design and construction, is expanded in order to disregard conforming to the fashion industry’s established size and rigid body determinations. Instead this system provides the experience of designing for your own body and scope of what makes a garment wearable, stylish, and unique to each individual definition of beauty.

How we dress provides essential clues to the daily experience of every human being, as well as hidden desires and actions that we intend to create. With this body of work, I revealed secrets expressing some of the very real traps that occur with a limited definition of femininity. I created this body of work as a young woman who was often confused and frustrated by the dark impressions of the feminine that were so prevalent in the collective mind. I watched and critiqued the images of who we are told to be, even seeing how I would pass through the experience of an archetype, realize it’s limitation, and then express that knowledge literally though imagery and text onto a dress. This form of costuming created a sense of liberation from the heaviness of the role and a chance to understand the archetype through personalization and interpretation.

Looking and being looked at. For several years, my artistic practice included large scale stage performances that featured actual people interpreting persona upon persona. The dresses I made incorporated the patterns of portrayal that occur at specific points during personal evolution. As we evolve, I’ve learned that we often assimilate archetypes and apply myth into modern time. We move through myths, hoping that the repetition of experience might answer a problem in a contemporary situation. In this body of work, a collaborative effort is made to combine personal history and collective iconography and use it to communicate transformation. Like punk rock priestesses, the actresses pull imagery and characters from the collective, distorting them into hyper feminized forms of reckless seduction and theatrical storytelling. Who do you want to be, who do you want me to be? Who’s next seems to be determined by both the desire to confess and the audience’s impulse to watch.

Sometimes, I draw, but it must be my years spent cutting out fabric that compels me to draw with my scissors. In my practice, one very tough lesson I had to learn was that not everything can belong on a dress. When I was displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I spent a few years just traveling from city to city, losing a sense of self and feeling very anxious as I saw the repetition of cars and big box stores virally spreading across the country. During that time, I saw so many people searching for spirituality and ways of soothing their nerves from their frantic daily experience. It made me remember my yoga practice and how the speed of my situation caused me to lose my personal sense of discipline. Once I settled in Chicago, I made these nostalgic and humorous drawings as a way of capturing the experience of that important time.