According to one of the fashion lecturers at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), it’s enough to bring a tear to your eye. We’re not talking about a tragedy here. These are tears of joy at seeing the creations of Paula Dunlop, Carla O’Donnell and Dani Klein, who are about to become the first graduates of QUT’s fashion honours program, the only course of its kind in the state and one of only a few in Australia.
These designers are using methods which allow them to exhaustively experiment with unconventional shapes, manipulating them in any way they can to produce multiple garments from each combination. Tops are turned upside-down, inside-out or sideways; seams are undone or new ones created; new pleats inserted; draping adjusted; it may become a dress, a skirt, a jacket, or simply a sleeve – no stone is left unturned.
Dunlop, O’Donnell and Klein have shifted away from the traditional fashion design process of sketching, pattern-making, cutting and sewing, towards methods which are more like those of visual artists.
Dunlop in particular comes to fashion with a strong background in visual arts, including illustration and collage.
She realised at the end of her undergraduate fashion degree that fashion design sketching was restricting her creativity, so this year has been about returning to her roots as a visual artist and finding a name for her fashion design process; bricolage.
“A bricoleur is someone who tends to build through trial and error, problem solving, rather than from a plan – making something from whatever is on hand at the time,” Dunlop says.
Chance has played a key role in her design process. Some of Dunlop’s work is created by throwing irregularly folded fabric onto the cutting table and laying randomly chosen pattern pieces straight onto the uneven surface.
The resulting unorthodox shapes are the base of Dunlop’s designs; she pins and drapes them straight onto a dressmaker’s dummy, sometimes creating one half and then creating an exact replica for the other side.
The end products reflect her ongoing exploration of shape, volume and silhouette, with sophisticated draping and origami-like folding.
A recently completed dress was based on one of her samples from last year. “[I] set about hacking into it and changing it and the end product looks nothing like the original,” Dunlop says. “Things morph and change, shapes get extended, then brought back. I couldn’t predict the end product.”
The dress is incredibly simple, with only three seams holding the carefully draped fabric together in an elegant design.
For Klein, on the other hand, it has been fashion all the way. She fell in love with fashion as a young girl and is passionate about pursuing a career in the fashion houses of Europe. Klein focuses on creating clothes that make people think.
This year has been about concept-based designs, and renewing and refining her creative process and focus. The result is the Little Black Dress project.
For one piece, a pattern of one of the dress’s pockets was taken and enlarged. Pocket shapes were then stitched together to form a new garment.
Some of Klein’s garments are abstract artifacts that are not designed to be worn. Instead they are created to push boundaries and raise questions about what can be called a little black dress.
For part of the project Klein has explored two-dimensional and multimedia approaches to fashion and designing; scanning pieces of the original dress and digitally manipulating them to create beautiful, melancholy images of dresses. The 18-image series echoes both the restrictive, detailed dresses of the 18th century and the voluminous, angular shapes of Japanese avant-garde fashion design.
O’Donnell is inspired by the idea of intimacy in clothing and design for both the creator and the wearer.
She is interested in “the idea of [clothing] being an intimate space, and how we experience our clothes through wear and the relationship with the body, or through memory – and not just clothing but objects and other things that people keep and have these other associations [with].”
“Boxes are spaces where we keep those things and where we keep clothes and things like that, that have a meaning and a memory and a narrative.”
O’Donnell has spent a lot of time rummaging through boxes and drawers, including a work placement earlier this year at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Australian Fashion and Textiles Department.
“I realised it was the idea of what I might find that was more exciting than what I actually found,” she says.
Her current work takes this idea of what she can find in boxes to a new level. She pulls boxes apart and uses the flat shapes as initial pattern pieces for her garments, transforming holding vessels for intimate objects into precious garments which enclose the body. New intimate relationships are created between objects, their owners and their makers.
O’Donnell and Dunlop both strive to produce garments that are wearable and treasured. Although they use abstract and art-based foundations, the end products don’t necessarily signal their starting points. It is more important that it’s evident their hands touched the garments when they crafted them.
At the end of the day, the aim is to produce fashion which is wearable and valued fashion.
Creating that fashion is a meticulous, time-devouring process for Klein, Dunlop and O’Donnell, but the results speak for themselves. The details are flawless and the draping is delectable. Above all though, the work is fresh and new, and could mark a new era of Brisbane-born fashion. This is the future of Brisbane fashion – look forward to the feast.