Among the various installations and artworks on display at the Glasgow School of Art degree show in the Tontine Building there is one by Georgia Mackie that consists in a series of strips of colours projected on two walls. The uneven stripes, similar to those of a plastic tent, constantly move and mutate their colour and thickness reproducing a sort of sequence of colourful barcodes.
Colour bars from television test patterns and video images presenting a series of stripes in yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red and blue in descending order of luminance at 75% and 100% saturation, can be visually striking.
Bars of colours or stripes have often been used in the art world as they create instantly recognisable motifs: think for example about Jim Lambie's vinyl tape installations (the latest is currently covering the central staircase leading to London's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition).
This trend resurfaced in fashion in Christopher Kane's Resort 2016 collection with a few cashmere jumpers and tops with delicate colourful stripes. The designer resumed the bar code theme also in his S/S 2016 menswear collection. The latter was inspired by science with tweed patterns evoking molecules (reinterpreted as coloured dots), thick rope-like elements referencing sutures and marble prints hinting at decaying molecular matter.
While science is a great inspiration and what will save many designers from blandness, it's undeniable that younger generations of Kane fans will be more attracted by the matching coats, shirts, and pants covered in coloured barcodes, as their bold graphic quality and pattern-like structures primarily create a strong visual (rather than an intellectual) experience.
Another GSA gradute, Gregor Henderson, recipient of the Landscape Drawing Prize, moved instead in his final project from graffiti artists who create new visual environments and spaces in derelict and abandoned areas.
Henderson takes pictures of these marginalised gritty spaces, documenting them as a photographer would.
Then, drawing from American hip hop, Asian calligraphy, semiotics and mark making, he comes up with stencils or turns 2-D images into 3-D works by carving out of paper the same urban spaces he has photographed.
The result is a sort of delicate layered artwork that almost looks like fragile architectural lace and that brings to mind other techniques and materials that belong to the fashion realm.
In his Resort 16 collection, Kane trapped for example in a transparent plastic raincoat a layer of Chantilly lace, creating a 2D/3D illusion, while he also created multiple layers or cut out effects adding Swiss lace hearts on jacket lapels, shirt collars, elbow and knee-patches or as decorative motifs for pastel dresses.
Though it is obvious that the mediums employed in these artworks and collections are different, there are still links between certain key themes and ideas. Besides, the ways such themes were developed and executed in both these art and fashion projects strengthens the impression that the current connection between these two disciplines goes beyond the mere representation of an arty print or painting on a garment.
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