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The 21-year-old RMIT fashion student Betty Liu explores the multiple functions of clothes with particular interests paid to technology, sociology, identity, and nature. As a fashion practitioner, she is interested in exploring issues surrounding gender, post-colonial discourse, and consumption.
Currently, she is in her last year of uni, working on her graduation series. Her last project ‘After Print’ is all about bee’s and we asked her some questions about the project.
Can you tell me something about your After Print project?
This series is a trilogy of works that explore nature from the sight perspective of bees as an effort to raise awareness to colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomenon that has drastically impacted the bee population in North America and Europe.
What was your inspiration for this project?
The television series Black Mirror actually informed me about this phenomenon and a Japanese manga: Meitantei Conan gave me the idea to look into the after image illusion and combine these two together.
Can you explain your creative design process?
I always start with asking myself what I want to portray with this work by writing down thoughts and linkages to different types of sewing techniques, garment archetypes or silhouettes.
Then I explore various design techniques such as collage, draping, deconstruction to see if I can find any outlooks that will work with the concept. The process is repeated again and again until I am satisfied with the result and that’s when I start drafting and making.
What is your goal with this project?
On one hand, it’s to bring awareness to CCD and the decreasing bee population while also exploring how to execute these ideas in relation to color theory and sculptural forms.
What are your plans for the future?
I would like to continue working in the field of fashion after I graduate, ideally where I have my own practice; not sure whether I want my own label or not.
Interview by Isabeau van Maastricht
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The sugarcane field is calling with its hot and humid environment, inhospitable, challenging, mesmerizing. The eye can see beyond the horizon, the ear can hear the echo of the faraway river, the skin can feel the cindering heat. The plane seems to vibrate and moves up and down in a ritual dance. The drum of the shaman reverberates from its dry stretched skin. Life is a matter of endurance. A creative survival mode made with a make-do aesthetic.
The grasses are waving and give the illusion of air, although the stifling heat is numbing the mind, reducing humans to primitive beings. Just thinking of water, dreaming of air. Contemplating the arid beauty of it all. These grasses become products of culture with baskets, roofs and habitats, plant fodder for miraculous indigenous fiber. Fibrous textiles are coming to the fore with waving grass skirts and grassroots design, making a primitive and archaic impression, steering fashion to an animistic core.
The grasses are multiple and represent an ecosphere that hosts many endemic eagles, macaws and toucans adding their strident song to the bewitching rhythms. Ants, termites and butterflies are busy building their habitats; a whole world concerned with the creation of life. As the creation of style it requests a sense of urgency, a fight for survival, a quest for derision. A holistic ecosystem that brings out the best in the human imagination and steers it to new heights, conceiving unknown territories of visual experiences.
The plateau is on a high altitude and makes people short of breath, feeling euphoric as if the grasses could be consumed as hallucinogens. A weird experience that reflects the amazing costumes that are born from fiber, generated by grass, consumed with human waste as well. Thus the natural and the artificial blend and become one, diluting the idea that everything needs to be from nature, including human nature as a source of synthetic grasses, made to wrap and protect.
Gathering fruits, fibers and firewood the nomadic ancestors would roam the grasslands living in survival mode, hunting monkeys, but hunted by jaguars and ocelots. Wading through the dense and dry grasses that have cutting edge properties, made to defend themselves, the loose hunting outfits are reflected in the gathered skins and protective armor made from dense textiles wrapped with rope. The head is covered for the punishing sun. The feet are wrapped in rope made from fat plants.
All matter is used for functional purposes, all matter is seen as decorative as well. The grass is woven and braided, the cloth is layered and stitched, the skins are tanned and rustic, the grass roots of Brazilian creation is in the abundance of its raw materials, its generosity of growing matter, its aesthetic.
Improvized as only Brazilian creation can achieve.
Lidewij Edelkoort
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Until September 30, 2018, the exhibition ‘Get Up, Stand Up!’ is exhibited at MIMA museum in Brussels, Belgium. Four hundred fifty posters and objects from thirty countries and five continents show how the citizens in the years 1968-1973 made their voices heard to fight against all forms of injustice. “Those 6 years of political and social unrest will forever be remembered in France, the U.S. and around the globe as the years where people strongly yearned and protested for equality, dignity, freedom, and justice.”
The exhibition is all about changing the world with posters and how much impact this graphic protest movement had in the past before there were internet and social media. Where we now have social media, the issues remain the same: civil rights, the environment, feminism, jobs, minority repression, peace, sexism, and war.
The museum shows also an installation of the historic work 'Frappez les gradés', created in 1969 by Julio Le Parc. Throughout the exhibition run, MIMA hosts creative workshops on the protest poster theme.
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Photographers Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick where partners in life and work as they collaborated for 30 years to document African American life in and around native New Orleans. “Calhoun and McCormick’s photographs show the artists in tune with each other as well as the rich complexity of Louisiana identity, from the local street culture and parades of their city to life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.”
This book is an exhibition catalog that belongs to the exhibition on tour; ‘Slavery, the Prison Industrial Complex’, That will be in Los Angeles from September 22, 2018, until January 4, 2019.
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EVENTS
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TREND SEMINARS
THE HOUSE OF COLOURS
Home & Interior 2020
August 14, 2018
NEW YORK
AW 19-20 ENLIGHTMENT
August 15, 2018
NEW YORK
SUMMER 2020 COLOUR & TREND PREVIEW
August 15, 2018
NEW YORK
Details & Bookings
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TALKING TEXTILES
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TALKING TEXTILES #2
The wild and vibrant second issue of TALKING TEXTILES is organised around the culture of cloth. In this trend magazine, the mood is up and creativity is on the loose, celebrating the revival of textiles. This issue is filled with remarkable developments in textiles, art, clothes and interiors, from artisans and artists to mills, manufacturers, designers and innovators as well as talented graduates. With colour, textile and yarn forecasts by Li Edelkoort, a whirlwind of floating fibres, harvested yarns, tubular colours, woven fences and knitted architecture will fuel readers’ creative energy.
€60 plus shipping & handling
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MORE TRENDS
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TREND TABLET
Trendtablet explains how trends grow, evolve and flow, and helps us better understand and perceive how they interact in our daily lives. this tool accessed for free is open to comments and new ideas, please contribute and be part of our network .Enjoy!
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ANTI_FASHION
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This much-talked-about and thought-provoking manifesto by the world’s most respected trend forecaster covers the 10 main issues that indicate the fashion industry has reached breaking point. Edelkoort courageously confronts marketing and advertising, as well as challenging education, materials, manufacturing, retailing, designers, fashion shows, the press and consumers alike. This means that the economy of clothes will take over from the turnover of fashion. Therefore trend forecasting has changed as well, taking its leads from social change and finding creative ideas within lifestyle trends and consumer behavior. A break-through philosophy focusing on textiles, garment-making and the imminent revival of couture. It’s time to simply celebrate clothes!
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BLOOM FAITH
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Confronted with the adversary of human designed disasters and manmade political scandals paralyzing our planet and countries, people’s only recourse becomes faith, an almost forgotten principle. To have faith in the spirit of survival, to have faith in creative forces able to rebuild society, an intrinsic need to believe in the human race, especially in moments of bewildering despair. We need to trust our instincts to build a better future, full with genuine love towards ourselves and others, even those at fault. Being able to forgive, to understand, to comprehend, to taste the fear in others. To pledge an awareness of altruism, script a gospel of compassion. Desire needs to be embedded in empathy.
Recognizing their inspirations and yielding to innate creative urges, artists and designers will build up the needed confidence to create new matter, landscape other horizons, design decorative objects, weave unusual fibers, draw non-existent flowers, created with the deep conviction that aesthetic expressions will resonate with others and are able to heal and care for people. Faith grows from future generations, professing their reliance on inner strength, convinced to reroute society the way they see it; convivial, cooperative, concerting, concerned, a society where truth remains an important quality and flexible forms of constancy help to compose the rhythm of existence.
Lidewij Edelkoort.
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