| When the right artist comes along, the relationship between fine arts and fashion proves to be a match made in design heaven. An artist looks beyond the restrictions of fashion design – namely, the human form – and produces a garment that is wearable while exceeding convention.
And like all great relationships, when an artist makes a successful foray into fashion, he or she usually challenges – but never alienates – a fashionista’s esthetic, while in turn, the fashionista dubs the creation as couture.
Young fibre-arts student Giulia Fatica creates amazing dresses out of spools of thread, and proves that fibre artists can create more than just elaborate wall hangings.
Only in her second year at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD), Fatica is aware of what it takes to become a successful artist and is constantly challenging her creativity to produce art or garments out of various fibres.
"I’m interested in the simplification of the material and manipulating the material to see what it can become," she says.
With just two 6,000-metre spools of thread and a sewing machine, Fatica began to create her body of work, which she calls Threads. Her dresses, exhibited last month at ACAD’s ArtaWEARness show, were a self-challenge and artistic exploration for Fatica, who wanted to see if a garment could be made solely out of thread instead of the usual manufactured fabric. "I never used a sewing machine nor created a garment until Threads," she reveals.
To execute her idea, Fatica created small squares of thread material, approximately three inches by three inches, by making repeated sewing-machine stitches with an embroidery foot on Aqua Film, a plastic embroidery material that dissolves in water. When she had created 10 of these squares, Fatica hand-sewed them together, then dissolved the Aqua Film, which resulted in odd shapes of material that resemble a series of fused threads or pieces of bouclé fabric that are soft to the touch.
To make the dress, she took a couture approach, constructing the skirt portion on a dressmaker’s mannequin with the same waist size as Fatica and her ArtaWEARness model. For the top half of the dress, she hand-sewed the material to her model and herself to achieve a perfect fit.
"I had to cut the material to fit the breast, back, shoulders and torso," she says. "For myself, I had to do this in front of a mirror, which took me two-and-a-half hours!"
The final result is a durable and wearable dress composed of 30,000 metres of thread. "I did not want any zippers or buttons, just threads," Fatica says.
Although Threads was not a class assignment, she chose to enter her dresses in the ArtaWEARness show on March 26. "You must get out there and do what you want, or else you will never become a true artist," she says.
Fatica began composing Threads in January of this year, working on it every day for 12 hours and sometimes longer. She had to cut back on her studies to make time for producing the dresses. "I reduced my course load down to three classes, enough to maintain my full-time status," she says. The dresses weren’t finished until the night of the show. "This project consumed my entire life," she says with a laugh.
That night, Fatica and her model danced down the runway in high spirits. "I wanted the choreography to be a celebration of the material, what we can create with it, and what the material can do to our bodies," says Fatica.
Her hard work reaped its rewards. Fatica ended up receiving a $500 scholarship for both the garment and the choreography.
So why would an apparently natural couturier choose fibre art over fashion? "I prefer art school over fashion, because I am free to explore artistic ways of turning my ideas into fashion," says Fatica. "Fashion has standards that must be followed, and I like to break rules!" |
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