ARTEFACT FOOTWEAR, FUTURES
� � LONDON COLLEGE OF FASHION, UAL
Showcasing the selected work from three of London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London’s post graduate courses; MA Fashion Artefact, MA Footwear and MA Fashion Futures. The three courses run within a 15-month programme culminating in a thesis which is rationalised and tested through the manufacture of products. The students arrive from broad design backgrounds and they are afforded the opportunity and critical environments to question, dissect, subvert, and challenge the existence and future possibilities of why and how products should exist within contemporary society. All three courses are individual in nature but share the common goal of redefining the way fashion is perceived. Through critical debate, fashion can offer valuable narratives, that not only interface socio-cultural and political arguments but also challenge and redefine new possibilities within the manufacturing process through both digital technologies and craftsmanship. We have no boundaries but seek to support each individual student through their own personal journey of discovery. These individual narratives have taken many trajectories over the years, engaging employment at leading international design companies, brands, entrepreneurs, and through expanded research at PhD level. Dai Rees Creative Director of Graduate communities
� Boyeong Lim, MA Artefact, 2018
MA Fashion Artefact is as original as its name suggests. The course is now in its eleventh year and is internationally recognised as a pioneering incubator of original designer, makers whose work sets out to challenge and redefine how fashion products can change and influence the world we live in. Hailed as a leader within educational practice. It has developed and nurtured an impressive roster of alumni, many of whom have gone onto to win prestigious art, design and technology, awards. Their work has been showcased both at national and international level exhibitions, and alumni have gone on to successfully set up their own design companies and work within leading international brands Post graduate students within Fashion Artefact come from varied educational backgrounds such as architecture product & furniture design. These diverse skillsets are nurtured within an open dialogue studio environment, where craftsmanship, engineering, and technology are afforded the time and space to develop a comprehensive and personal perspective on fashion in its widest context. The course defines its position within education and the wider creative industries by focusing on the provocative possibilities of an everchanging spectrum of arenas and audiences. Course Leader Dai Rees Senior Tutor Naomi Filmer
MA FASHION ARTEFACT
� MA FASHION ARTEFACT
BOYEONG LIM These six artefacts are based on different journeys. Each artefact has articulating movements in a sequence thereby completing its expression. They start at what seems a plain sculpture however through the articulation of movement, a three-dimensional object emerges creating an abstraction as well as a new function. The purpose of the artefacts is realised once a connection is formed between the viewer and the artefact.
→ Instagram: bylim__ → boyoung0113@gmail.com
CATALINA ALBERTINI Women have long been likened to pretty flowers and traditional crafts, particularly embroidery, have been seen as ‘female’ tools. The project explores how to speak about politicised femininity through orchid references, crafts and surface design. The concept of “a seductive still life” aims to reverse the idea of the traditional floral painting feminising the home towards a discourse about female empowerment –highly relevant in 2018- by taking the crafts to the level of design. Orchideal references act both as a metaphor of female seductiveness and refer to the genera as well. The species´ sexual strategies led to the concept and development of this sensorial collection of handcrafted sculptural leather pieces. The ultimate goal is to seduce the eye and create a magnetic connection between the object and the audience, at the same time exploring the fashion accessory within the context of the home and the body.
→ Instagram: catialbertini → cata_albertini@hotmail.com
XIAOHAN WANG (HAN) Sculpt bodies by implants, shape structures by pattern cutting, and change the surface of skin by grafting. Bodies nowadays are more than real life. In order to fit clothes, changing bodies by plastic surgery is like casting a mannequin. Combinations of different leathers and fabrics bridge fields in terms of skin grafting and it shows that skin is similar to fabrics, which could be shaped and changed by cutting.
→ Instagram: xiaohan0131 → wxh-1994@163.com
LAURA OLIVELLA RODRIGUEZ Life is not what we live, but what we remember and what we transmit to others. It is essential to involve personal experiences and beliefs into design to create artefacts that express unique and unalterable stories. These pieces tell the story of aesthetics that have influenced me and they are related to the culture and heritage of Colombia. This collection updates the enriched iconographic used by the Colombian Indigenous ‘Arhuacos’ and evolve these symbols into the contemporary fashion world. This indigenous graphics symbolises the creation of life, represents the cultural identity of the tribe and reflects the way they think.
→ Instagram: lolivella_design → lauolivella@gmail.com
LIANG CHENG People are strained by different limitations created by external environments, personal physical fitness and inner moral codes of conduct. This project uses materials combined with movement to present and explore the boundaries between people and outside things and space, as well as the extension and restrictions of the human body. While discussing the limits of the human body, the works discuss the extensibility and restriction of the material at the same time. It is a challenge to use the properties of the object combined with physical movements and express the concept of works through the performance.
→ Instagram: liattbbm → liannacheng17@163.com
MA Footwear offers a coherent balance between concept and craft, between critical thinking and discovery through making. Students from a broad array of design backgrounds are challenged to consider what footwear can be. We investigate how social, political, cultural, and technological issues inform new approaches to the design of footwear. With a strong emphasis on research, innovation and collaboration the students are encouraged to explore footwear design and manufacture from the handmade craft techniques to cutting edge technologies. To take their ideas and ‘learn through making’ in a dedicated studio environment – developing a body of work both conceptually and technically, through investigation and discovery we see ideas that challenge current industry perspective and pose future solutions for footwear creation and consumption of footwear in a wider context. This exhibition presents a variety of proposals that explore these contexts in more detail – commercial, artistic, experimental, conceptual. We see how work is informed by innovative thinking about alternative materials and form - future use of technologies and new approach to craft - footwear that explores emotional response – footwear devices for wellbeing – future production alternative thinking and simply shoes that offer new aesthetic possibilities. Course Leader Eelko Moorer Associate Lecturer Georgina Goodman
MA FOOTWEAR
 MA FOOTWEAR
LAURA THOMAS Re:trace explores the power of retracing your steps to understand and bring awareness to depression. Captured in four forms: footwear artefacts, drawing, dance and film, each aspect is presented as one complete narrative giving a complete picture of the emotional journey. The collection of five footwear artefacts, made entirely from graphite, seek to push the boundary of what footwear can be while highlighting the prevalent issue of mental health within today’s society. Inspired by my own experience, each chapter within the film represents each stage of depression through different movements, artefacts and drawings. Each chapter, denial, isolation, anger, acceptance and hope, are obstacles that the performer must overcome. This multi-disciplinary approach provides an insight into the battle of combatting depression and helps to spread awareness of the difficult stages to recovery.
→ Instagram: __laurathomas → laura.thomas8@outlook.com
HYE YEONG KIM Put yourself in these shoes. The artefacts encourage the viewer to put themselves in these shoes therefore evoking an empathetic reaction in the viewer. The absent body is explored as a de-familiarisation technique to arrest the gaze of the viewer. The artefacts invite the viewer to ‘step into’ the experience where upon, after closer inspection the artefact turns out to be handcrafted, and through this display traces of the maker, emphasising a human approach. It is in this way that the viewer is challenged to engage in an empathetic dialogue with the objects. Hence, the viewer can imagine themselves in somebody else’s shoes.
→ Instagram: hyy__kim → hyeyeongkim89@gmail.com
HELEEN OVERBEEK EXP:RED is a paper-based material innovation for footwear (certified by SATRA, 2017) which enables designers to produce disposable and recyclable products to make environmentally friendly overconsumption possible. The project speculates on the way designers could alter products and manufacturing to benefit both humanity and the planet. The collection showcases the possibilities of the material and the DIY Paper Shoe Kit explains how to produce with it. By making the viewer a participant in the production process, the Kit creates a social and educational aspect past shopping and wearing to alter user interaction with the product. EXP:RED Best after use.
→ Instagram: heleenoverbeek/ → hpaoverbeek@gmail.com
ELIANA ZURLO Nowadays, people live a sedentary lifestyle that contributes the obesity problem. According to the British Health Foundation, around 39% of UK adults fail to meet targets for physical activity. Exercise is one of the best weight loss methods but is difficult to permanently change lifestyles because of lack of motivation, leading to low mood and inaccurate weight perception. The idea of the project is to work against these difficulties through playful activities, looking to increase and motivate participation of individuals in physical activity, thereby encouraging them to become increasingly aware of the health benefits.
→ Instagram: zurlo_eliana/ → zurloeliana@gmail.com
CHIH CHI FONG (CHICHI) New Chinoiserie Chic is a women’s fashion trainer brand where the aesthetic of Chinese footwear and handicraft are combined with western style aesthetics. In the way of form and embellishment, the collection uses design features drawn from Chinese culture. The collection questions the problematic term ‘Chinoiserie’ as a cultural resource being mis-referenced in fashion and asks, can be reclaimed by design value?
→ Instagram: chihchifong/ → guessfong0212@hotmail.com
KARINE KASHUKCHYAN "Ponte Di Luna" This collection comprises six models of designer footwear as wearable limited-edition art objects for the luxury market. This functional collection explores how ‘biomimetics’ architectural constructions can be applied in footwear design. One of the aims of this project was to find and create new constructivedecorative elements for shoe heels through exploring biological shapes and biomimetics of architectural constructions like bridges. Elements of bridge design can be incorporated in the development of footwear, particularly for joining uppers and heels in one unified construction. These constructive-decorative elements inform functional aesthetics that balance commerciality and creativity. One part of this collection displays shoes as art objects, whilst another part of collection can be developed and adapted for industry in the luxury market. Using a combination of traditional craft manufacturing for uppers and contemporary digital technology for heel constructions in 3D -printing provides new approaches for manufacturing technologies exploring sculptural possibilities for footwear as artistic objects.
→ Instagram: karin_kashukchyan → karine_kashukchyan@yahoo.com
EMILIE COHRT Re:Connect and the Footsie slippers explores how the foot can be a primary site for interpersonal connectivity and intimacy in an age of globalised social structures and digitally mediated communication. By relying more and more on technology to connect with each other, we lose a wealth of communicative detail that makes us feel truly close and connected. Details like social touch - a way of communicating fundamental not just to human wellbeing and health, but to that of almost all mammals. But social touch is missing from current digital communication. As a result, a paradox arises: we have never been more connected, yet we have also never been more lonely. Re:Connect instigates debate and deliberate decision making about the extent and role of technology in our future human-to-human interactions. The prototype developed has the functionality to be a means for long-distance couples to exchange the affectionate touches of playing footsie on the sofa, and thus feel a deeper sense of closeness, resolving the problem of physical distance and re-enabling an important social interaction. The Footsies represent a future wherein technology has been used to solve the problems of physical and interpersonal distance, and everyone has a technological means of experiencing meaningful connections with others. This envisioned future can help us understand how our technological present is effecting our interactions and consequently our health and wellbeing. It lets us rethink our digital interactions and, by questioning them, actively choose what we want both the present and the future to be.
→ Instagram: emiliecohrt → ecohrt@emiliecohrt.com
SIYING ZOU Gender is whatever Anima&Animus challenges and subverts the gender binary of traditional typologies of footwear to generate new androgynous aesthetics. Inspired by craftsmanship of traditional footwear and 1960s peacock revolution, deconstructing men’s brogues and reconstructing with specific elements of ‘female’ typology of footwear. Bringing contradictory and unfamiliar sexual feeling to viewers through exploded views of footwear to redefine sexualised gender footwear. This collection of neutral products encourage people to shake off their straightforward jacket of gender, embrace other genders inside our bodies and challenge the gendered associated material and colour of footwear such as pink silk, brown boxing leather, cobalt blue suede.
→ Instagram: zou_siying → zousiying1363@163.com
MA Fashion Futures was the first course in the world to explore sustainability through a fashion lens. Students are encouraged to critique the nature and purpose of design in a rapidly changing world, imagining and envisioning alternative ways in which fashion will be created and experienced in the future, whilst grounding their research in an understanding of the immense challenges that face our industry today. The intention is to build a generation of practitioners who are adaptable, experimental, entrepreneurial and eco-literate; exemplars of the skills we need for the future; designers of new paths and roles, rather than followers of tried and tested routes. Course Leader Alex Mcintosh
MA FASHION FUTURES
� MA FASHION FUTURES
ANIA ZOLTOWKOWSKI The rampant unsustainability of contemporary fashion and textile design practice, demonstrates the colossal need for new guiding paradigms, in order to create thriving futures within the planetary boundaries. Resilience provides a holistic, interdisciplinary frame-work, amalgamating ecology, systems theory and practice, as well as multiple design for sustainability strategies. This project investigates the potentiality of resilience thinking and practice as an alternative framework for the fashion and textile design space. Resilience provides a fresh lens from which to tell new stories, ask deeper questions, and improve our understanding of one another and the world around us. Attempting to render the properties into a visual component, the digital illustrations presented are composed of abstract ‘fashion organisms’, that enhance the theory and ignite further dialogue into the resilience discourse.
→ Instagram: aniazoltkowski → aniazoltkowski@gmail.com
CHRISTINA HAXHOLM The ‘Regenesis of Fur’ project has grown entirely from the idea of creating in-vitro grown fur. The fashion industry is adopting synthetic biology and genetic modification, and is developing “victim-free” and genetically modified animal materials such as spider silk and lab-grown leather. The process often involves man-made DNA and genetically modified yeast, which will produce the proteins that make up most animal materials. This project explores how these new, bioengineered materials will redefine our positions on bioethics, ideas about veganism, and our understanding what it means to be ‘natural’. As you form your opinion, consider this; · How integral is DNA to the question of rights and ownership? · Could lab-grown materials, made with man-made genomes identical to those of animals, be considered a vegan solution? · In a future where the lines between the 'natural' and the 'unnatural' are blurred by technology, will the seductive beauty of biophilic design and marketing be used to affect public opinion on GM and synthetic biology?
→ Instagram: christinahaxholm → christinahaxholm@gmail.com
DIAN JEN LIN Design should always be drenched in sustainability and dignity. By actively engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration and research, this work aims to challenge the status quo of fashion, sustainability and design. Design Nudges for Sustainable Consumption is an interdisciplinary research project that investigates the possibility of engaging consumers with environmental ethics via hacking and re-designing the graphic packaging design of daily commodities. The aim is to collect evidence from psychological experiments to determine the most effective.
→ Instagram: post.carbon.fashion → post.carbon.fashion@gmail.com
LISBETH BERG Imagining futures for the fashion industry: How can a human-centred approach to fashion design create alternatives for a sustainable fashion future? The workshop explores an approach to human-centred fashion design where futuring and human wellbeing is at the core of the design process. It uses the fashion experience is a gateway to unlocking design concepts and questioning the standard product focused fashion design process.
→ Instagram: llb_fashion → lisbeth@llbfashion.com
MOLSHREE VAID AI-based chatbot, Cleverly, takes the female online shopper on an alternate customer journey. The key value proposition is to nudge her towards ‘buying smarter’ than ‘buying more’. Each time the user looks up a product online, a three-step process kicks in that evaluates the following: ‘do you have a similar item in your wardrobe?, ‘does it fit you?’ and ‘is this your style?’. Cleverly’s guiding principle turns the reduce online friction wisdom on its head as the project aim was to investigate the opportunities for slowing down the process of buying fashion online and bringing consideration into play.
→ Instagram: mollvai → molshree.vaid@gmail.com
LAURE FERNANDEZ In the view of the rapid degradation of the natural world, questioning and redefining human beings’ relationship to nature is inevitable. Fortunately, new ways of thinking about the composition of the world are emerging, some of which are informed and inspired by the deep connection between native communities and nature. Assuming that the issue is lying in the core of our understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of what nature is; and in the light of the current enthusiasm of brands and organisations in communicating sustainability; it is a perfect time to start an exploration of new perspectives and media environments. ‘The Flora Dialogue’ is an attempt of informing sustainability communication with spiritual principals, playing with the medium and the content as channels towards a meditative journey of identity and the dress.
→ Instagram: laure_fernandezz → Contact: laurefernandez@hotmail.fr
KATIE CAVACCO Crafted Connections is a hand made board game that introduces players to the concepts of slow fashion and localism by exploring the role of makers in regional fibre and textile production systems. Using six unique ‘Maker’ characters, players traverse a season based game board, interacting with other makers and becoming familiar with the tools, materials and processes of their character’s craft as they go. Tactility and materiality are essential parts of the game experience. This game was constructed using a variety of techniques including wet felting, needle felting and embroidery.
→ Instagram: freeramblin → freeramblin@gmail.com
ISABELA GYGAX There are two young fish swimming together, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning guys, how's the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and eventually one of them looks at the other and goes: “What the hell is water?” The exhibit "What is Our Water" is a collaborative experiment investigating different notions of dignity surrounding garments, fashion and consumption, as a means to visualise the human condition we are living in. What, as humans and as a society, do we actually display? Is our 'appearing-ness' nothing more than a mere consumption-performance? With this work I aim to set the corner stone for developing a language that communicates the values of dignity and quality through fashion.
→ Instagram: isabela_glitzersternli → gygax.isabela@gmail.com
→ Hye Yeong Kim, MA Footwear
Exhibition Design Joana Filipe Graphic Design Joana Pestana Production Assistant Daniela Amolini Production Steven Legget
London College of Fashion 20 John Prince's Street London, W1G 0BJ Twitter @LCFLondon Instagram @LCFLondon_ Facebook LCFOffical arts.ac.uk/fashion
� BOYEONG LIM � CATALINA ALBERTINI � XIAOHAN WANG (HAN) � LAURA O. RODRIGUEZ � LIANG CHENG CHIH CHI FONG (CHICHI) ELIANA ZURLO EMILIE COHRT HELEEN OVERBEEK HYE YEONG KIM KARINE KASHUKCHYAN LAURA THOMAS SISSIE ZHOU (SISSIE) � ANIA ZOLTOWSKI � CHRISTINA HAXHOLM � DIAN-JEN LIN � ISABELA GYGAX � KATIE CAVACCO � LAURE FERNANDEZ � LISBETH LØVBAK BERG � MOLSHREE VAID