MIRRORMASQUE

MIRRORMASQUE

BY LILIA YIP

MirrorMasque, a fashion project by designer and artist Lilia Yip, takes its name from the surreal film MirrorMask by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, which tells the story of a girl who feels trapped in her life with the family circus, longing to escape. Through clothing design and fashion photography, the project explores specific historical and contemporary uses of body adornment as symbols of freedom and rebellion.

In Chinese, the characters ‘ ’ (zi you) mean ‘freedom’. ‘ ’ meaning the self and ‘ ’ the ability to be.

The use of these characters in placement prints within the collection call to mind protest t-shirts such a Katherine Hamnett’s iconic anti-nuclear slogan t-shirt of 1984, as well as corporate uniforms branded with company logos - items of clothing that have used text to respectively express or mask the individual self.

Michael Godfrey writes in his article,“The End of the Queue: Hair as a Symbol in Chinese History,” published in the Chinese Heritage Quarterly:

“Hair has a way of personalising history. The Normans wore theirs short at the time of WiIliam the Conqueror, which is said to have prompted the English to grow theirs quite long. Both long locks and bald craniums have demonstrated political power and its absence.” [1]

Hair has at varying times been a physical expression of submission, subjugation, identification or rebellion. In China during the early decades of the Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912), the braided queue was a focus of resistance to

Manchu dominance and cutting one’s own queue became a symbol of political revolution in the last few years of imperial rule.

Throughout MirrorMasque, the words ‘ ’ are playfully interwoven with elements of hair, manifesting as digital prints and fashion details that allow the wearer to contemplate their own freedom, its tenuous existence and how easily its symbols can be removed or displaced.