May 15, 2023 |
With incompetent world leaders, never-ending wars, a pandemic, a worldwide recession and environmental destruction, it is utterly redundant to say that we are not living in the best of times. Meanwhile, the fashion industry runs on a false sense of safety and security, apt to mistake mortal wounds for mere scratches.
So what is the appropriate way to respond to the societal hurricane brewing, sartorially speaking? How do you dress ever-expanding wounds during an era of volatility? Answers lie underground, with a new generation of artists and designers on an avid search for alternative, more sustainable and inclusive ways of creating fashion that have meaning beyond that of improbable glamour.
These designers are crafting beauty that is perilous and prescient in our turbulent times. They are bypassing the rotten system and creating work that is as much art as fashion. They defy and define the darkness. Their garments, dishevelled, bleeding, mutated and mutilated, tell tales of woe and hope, addressing the politics of gender, identity, the climate and sustainability, guised under the veil of darkness. This new cohort of makers is rewriting the rules of escapism. Leaning into the doom and gloom of it all, they are reclaiming control in the chaos. Call it a sartorial coping mechanism.
Here, death and life wind around each other in a twisted ladder of corruption and couture, blistering and binding, gauze and grandeur, history and hysteria, sex and seams. From LeMAine’s “bleeding, decaying, dead things” to Tuuli Turunen’s perilous spirits of the Finnish woodland, these fashion designers, makers and artists encapsulate the dark times we live in. Their clothes are to die for, and they are radically alive. Meet the new generation dressing our wounds.
LEMAINE
Flesh. Infested with all manner of infectious agents, oozy, fiendish, delightfully bloodied and bloody wonderful. Lena M Áine crafts wearable art pieces that are more like the aftermath of explicit, stomach-turning carnage than fashion per se.
The designer and experimental artist grew up in an army training camp and studied fine arts before they completed a fashion degree at Norwich University of the Arts, where they first developed their signature innovative, SFX-based bloody textiles.
Fetishwear for some and a sartorial statement on abortion rights for others, there’s little mileage in attributing a single, fixed idea to their “imitation flesh”. Like the liminal quality of the substance it revels in, the meaning of LeMAine’s work flows. Hand-crafted by the designer, corsets, dresses and bags draw upon blood’s potency as a metaphor and a physical matter. Initially a representation of the bloodshed of climate change, the meaning of their “flesh” has evolved into a fluid statement on identities, gender, queerness and empowerment.
“Whether it’s my very personal experiences of being queer, being non-binary, my relationship with mental illness or general human experiences of loss, heartbreak and grief, flesh is something I can very cathartically put all of that pain in and turn into something I think is quite beautiful,” says the designer.
Whether you are into the gore of it all or not, the brazenly literal corporality of LeMAine’s work is reliably unignorable. “Love it or hate it, you’re definitely getting a lot of attention if you walk into a room wearing nothing but blood,” they say.
YODEA WILLIAMS BRAHAM
From a non-binary archangel that treads the line between heaven and hell to a wayfarer swathed in deconstructed denim and steel scraps, the work of the Sarabande Scholar and Central Saint Martins student Yodea Williams Braham’s is “an idiosyncratic journey to reconnect to my Black, Indigenous ancestors.” Inspired by their Jamaican lineage and memories of growing up in London, their cultural background is “an irreplaceable bridge that links my artistic practice to my own individuality.”
The designer’s latest project draws on their childhood in Tottenham and revisits the 2011 riots in Haringey that followed the tragic death of local Mark Duggan, shot dead by police on 4 August.
Williams Braham’s ultra-experimental take on sportswear materialises as an imposing, almost suffocating garment that binds the wearer in a pipe-like structure that looks like the intestine of a gutted creature. The found objects the designer has scavenged on Tottenham High Road integrate with the design.
“I think conflict has been a part of the human story from the beginning, and people have always found ways to adorn themselves,” says the designer. “I hope it can always be an aspect of my life that encourages reflection and experimentation.”
SARAH DOWLE
“War and peace, devotion or disregard… I love the mystique of religious iconography,” says designer Sarah Dowle. “The ability it has to render people absolutely calm, elated or saddened whether you believe in something or not.”
For her graduate collection, titled “Giants Among Men”, Dowle, originally from Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire, created her own religion, building an alternate world where “men search to be blessed by the shadow of an entity that is bigger than humankind.”
The garments materialise the push and pull between the giants and the worshippers of their shadows. Imposing sculpted leatherscapes of Dowle’s uncanny silhouettes throb and groan like the giant’s beating heart.
Long burdensome limbs drag behind the garments like shadows. Sculpted giants grapple with one another in the form of a floor-grazing coat, seamlessly moving on to the wearer’s body. Manipulated, morphing tailoring mirrors “the madness of devoted pilgrims”, searching to be blessed by the darkness.
Dowle’s collection is rather timely, considering the historical tendency of humankind to resort to religion during a time of incomprehensible chaos. But here, Gods dwell in the shadows. And they are not planning to drive out the darkness anytime soon.
WESLEY MANNERS
“I never really buy new clothes so, to get dressed, often I’ve recycled clothes, wearing them upside and ripped, tied together in weird ways,” says Wesley Manners. “For me, this process of dressing feels inherently queer, as it’s about the individual building themselves in the way they want.” The Leeds-born, half-Welsh, half-Caribbean designer creates pieces that are “delectably dishevelled, slutty, fun, queer, versatile: the elevated versions of the rags I’d wear to the clubs.”
A love letter to London’s queer nightlife, Manners’s crafted pieces are rooted in “obscure hypersexualisation, non-binary bodies, sex and psychedelics.” Modular knitwear draws on elements of shibari (Japanese rope bondage) techniques; boots are trimmed with human hair, handmade wooden platforms are adorned with ‘root’ shoe covers and tubular accessories spiral around the wearer’s torso.
Splicing “Jamaica’s dancehall queens with some east London queers doing a performance on a dirty warehouse floor,” Manners’ “unashamedly queer” work is a snapshot of the freedom London’s queer BIPOC nightlife can provide to the community. However, the ugly reality presents itself in its full glory when the sun comes up. “When I wear the stuff I make in the streets, sometimes it feels like a form of protest, even if maybe I don’t always want it to be that. I would love for things to move towards a state of being rather than categorising.”
TUULI TURUNEN
Documentary photographer and artist Tuuli Turunen’s first foray into fashion unearths Finnish religious and pagan tales, tragically erased by the spread of Christianity.
Titled “Lost in the Forest-Cover”, the fluid womenswear collection “is about loss and the distance to this ancient religion and our relationship with nature, especially in the time of the climate crisis.” Entirely handcrafted by the artist herself, the collection resurrects perilous female mythical characters Turunen was told about growing up in the far ends of Southern Finland.
These vengeful spirits drift through the frozen forests and emerge from the shadows, inhabiting sacred spaces. The collection was presented in St Giles Cripplegate in London last September, so beware, even churches might not be safe havens.
“I wanted to make something a bit odd, untrendy and even a bit gross,” Turunen says. Dark and empty branches of the “bear-skull” pine tree reach for the sky like the horns of a great beast. The forest deity Hiisi’s disfigured, transmuted skin is rendered in recycled tights. Swathed in moss, mould, with mud-stained hems and chiffon dresses lined with black hair, the forest creatures don garments adorned with teeth, claws and concrete clumps. “Creatures. Attitude. Adore, but don’t touch!”
RIKA KIM
“The fashion industry is like a strong flash. It’s splendid, but the shadow is dark. I feel like it chases fantasy but avoids talking about real life,” says Rika Kim.
The Royal College of Art graduate grew up in a conservative family in South Korea, which is often called the world’s cosmetic surgery capital. “I was curious about how women are obligated to be pretty, thin and sexy, how this idea is subordinated to men’s pleasure.” Rejecting mainstream ideas of beauty, Kim’s designs “materialise the concept of ambiguity between beauty and hideousness.”
The designer’s first collection, “Disappointment Guaranteed”, takes the rebellious spirit of COUM Transmissions and renders it in leather offcuts. COUM, famously labelled by a Tory MP as “wreckers of Western civilisation”, were a music and performance art collective formed in the UK in 1969. They confronted, subverted and challenged societal conventions through their outrageously transgressive performances and after their split in 1976, three members went on to form pioneering industrial group Throbbing Gristle.
Like COUM, Kim’s sculpted leather bodies refuse to behave, rejecting the outmoded but still persistent beauty standards in our patriarchal society. “Hermits” are hooded in ragged masks, which is an “element with sacred but sexual connotations” for the designer. Leather scraps are rendered in dishevelled, tentacular and revealing silhouettes, alluding to the performative aspect of gender identity.
“The design process is more like translating my sadness and sexual obsessions into beautiful visuals,” says Kim. “I feel like I’m relieving myself through the process.”
Taken from issue 70 of 10 Magazine – ROMANCE, REBEL, RESISTANCE – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
