Sun Printing, but Make it Fashion
The main focus of my series “Sun Printing, but Make it Fashion” is fashion sustainability. Clothes are the second biggest polluter in the world with large amounts ending up in landfills that take forever to decompose. “Fast fashion”, is the mass production of clothes that are usually being made by exploited workers in third world countries. Much of this type of clothing is what ends up in landfills. A main combatant against “fast fashion” is thrift shops.
The methods used in this series involve me either creating and sewing my own clothing or acquiring the garments from consignment stores. I am implementing upcycling into my project by taking something old and turning it into something new in a sustainable way. In an attempt to combine both my photography background and my new aspiration for fashion I decided to use cyanotype as a natural dye on my clothing garments.
Using Jackson Pollock inspired “paint splatters”, tie dyeing, or soaking the entire fabric I can change the color and add personality to certain garments. The cyanotype process involves brushing or painting a light sensitive solution onto a substrate, once dried you expose the substrate to sunlight and it turns into a rich blue color. It is used as an alternative photographic process. You could say that my coworker throughout this project would be the Sun. This ties in with the environmental aspect of work which involves using what is available to us in order to create art in a sustainable way.
Once each garment is designed and crafted, I take these pieces and generate a high fashion photoshoot with the garments. By using myself as a model, I am connecting myself to these pieces and showcasing how they can be worn and used. This brings me to my secondary focus in my work which is, gender inclusive fashion. Anyone can wear whatever they want that makes them feel comfortable and confident. Humans are complex creatures and we need various outlets to express ourselves. Having a gender binary restricts and limits creativity and self-expression.
Everyday people should be able to wake up and choose what they want to wear that day that will make them feel happy, regardless of what gender the clothes are assigned by society. I want people to think “I would wear that” when they look at the work in this series. I want people to start thinking of ways that they can be more sustainable when it comes to clothing, and not restrict themselves when it comes to what they want to wear.
