On a balmy spring evening, in a packed house at Stewart Theater, students from the College of Design and across the university paraded their collections as part of Art2Wear 2024, pulling the audience into another dimension.
With each collection, designers led us into their own worlds, from the depths of the ocean to wind-swept dunes, even traveling into outer space. The eight designers who showcased collections of four or more looks came from disciplines across the college, and their fields of study influenced their final looks.
See All Eight Designers’ Collections
Student Director Rachel Gore opened the show by highlighting the unique features of this year’s production – multi-designer collaborations, strong performance aspects and a focus on environmental design. A selection of students from the First Year Experience Paper Project showcased their collaborative forms in white, followed by the work of students in the fibers studio, taught by instructor Adrienne McKenzie. New to this year’s show was the option for designers to create single looks, condensing their design and narrative into a single, wearable item.
Once the full collections began, the monolithic LED screen in the center of the stage projected environmental elements that rooted the designer’s looks and enhanced the feeling of stepping into a new and unexpected environment. Poignant music set the stage, with designer Shannon Lekovitz using a live cellist to bring resonance to her collection of Entropy in which the ages of civilization, from the invention of fire to the industrial revolution documented moments in our history, ending with the glimmer of hope for the future.
Some collections explored elements of nature, including the depths of the ocean in Abigail Stuart’s Submerged, the elements in Josh Pope’s Evolve, and Katherine Ryan and Gabriela Hernandez Vargas’ Illuminature.
Others took a darker turn, including Kat Charrier’s Dom, in which 1950s oversized housewives devolve into malignant, glowing forms. Aurora Henderson brought oversized human anatomy to life in her collection Psilocybin, with models displaying multitudes of hands, oversized mouths, or multiple heads.
Some told poignant tales, including Henry Tran’s Journey to the West, which recounted his Vietnamese parents’ immigration to America and Summer Needham’s Interstellar, which shows that friendships can form, even from galaxies away.
The evening ended to unbridled applause, leaving audience-goers to ponder the theme that next year’s designers will take, and await another journey into the wild and wonderful world of Art2Wear.
This post was originally published in College of Design Blog.
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