Artist Statement
Iconic
With the pieces I’ve created, I try to tackle one of the big issues in the fashion industry today, “Fast Fashion”. Fast fashion is incredibly popular and apparent in gen z and millennial culture, especially due to social media apps such as Instagram and TikTok. Fast fashion is essentially very poorly made pieces of clothes of whatever style is the craze that week, they are made with cheap, environmentally unfriendly materials that are worn once, never worn again, and just thrown away. Not to mention the insanely immoral business practices these companies take part in. A major issue, being the textile industry’s contribution to climate change via discarded waste and air pollution. I created this series to raise awareness about environmentally and fashionably conscious clothing choices such as thrifting or buying clothes made from recycled materials. Clothing consumption has skyrocketed during the pandemic, this being due to just how easy it is to buy cheap and “fashionable” clothes online from shady sites such as Yesstyle, Fashion Nova and Shein. These sites are known to rip off designs, use bad quality materials, and practice bad hygiene standards.
Fashion illustration has recently become a passion of mine. I really enjoy illustrating streetwear as well as designing cool characters, so with these works I intend to incorporate both of those interests. A lot of my personal work recently has consisted of fantasy characters I designed, wearing stylish streetwear which I wanted to bring over into this project. All the pieces are made digitally, printed and mounted on foamcore. I then cut out some of the clothes of the characters so that there is a clear hole where the piece of clothing was. On my first piece, I cut out the cargo sweatpants, for the second; the oversized sweater and for my last piece; I cut out the patches on the jeans. I wanted to blend 2D art with 3D materials in a way that made sense and was visually striking. I filled each hole with different recycled materials such as plastic garbage bags, recycled fabrics and even some of my own old clothes. I wanted to address the stigma of wearing used or old clothes and express how they can still look incredibly stylish, even though retro and vintage are very IN right now.
The main take away from this series that I hope will stick with you would be; to avoid fast fashion stores, support environmentally friendly clothing choices and VINTAGE IS COOL.