Here and Now Fashion Festival

My project revolves around my mother’s experience that she had last summer.

All of a sudden she saw a black see-through curtain coming down within her vision, she got laser surgery, and now she sees black dots and threads in her vision. Normally, when non-visually impaired people think about vision impairment or illness, they automatically think about it in a negative way. However, the way she was explaining her experiences sounded very positive because, during my conversation with her, she would mostly use positive terms describing her experiences. She stated that there was another world behind the black curtains and it was very dreamlike, fascinating, and surprising.

So, I thought it was quite interesting to think of how she has been thinking positively about her eye conditions. Considering that, I wanted to illustrate how she sees the world now through my garments which are specifically textiles based, and break the preconception of people who are not visually impaired.

In terms of techniques, considering sustainable ways to construct garment shapes, I mostly utilized unused and old clothes from my closet, and did rearrangement iterations on a mannequin. Also, I tried to use organic (eco-friendly) fabric as my primary material. I also implemented various techniques and materials such as wax coating, image transferring, weaving, painting, etc. Throughout the development of my garment, I explored textile manipulations as well to develop and transform silk fabric into totally different materials and observe the limitation of silk fabric transformation.

Born in 1996 in South Korea, Jane Seohyeon Kim is an artist, textile designer, and fashion designer based in New York, NY. Her design is based on the multiculturalism that she experienced throughout her education in several cities such as Seoul, London, and NY. She later developed an interest to utilize and design with unordinary materials such as resin epoxy and silicon to create unique designs that represented her ideologies based on the different cultures that she experienced within fashion. Within her fashion career, Jane Seohyeon Kim had the privilege to assist the head director of Oscar De La Renta Furs. She is currently employed with the conceptual designer brand MaxxiJ, where she is inspired to incorporate sustainable materials within her future works.