ABOUT

For Zakonna Mavid, as a social awareness release. To shine a positive light of ageing, as a form of relinquishing fears of the inevitable.

The garment took 4 months of daily creation and experimentation. Before this, I had never worked with resin, and it took a great amount of experimentation to create a structure with likeness to a Lily flower. I knew I wanted it to be 3D and as thin as possible, to truly reflect the delicacy of a petal. Multiple boning, wire, crinoline, and rubber variations were made until I settled on resin. The most time consuming part of this was the flower moulds, these were made out of 0.5-1.5cm strips of craft card and taped together to eventually form a singular petal mould (15 unique petals in total). Then the issue came about on how the resin would not stick to the card. Leading me to experiment with cling film, truck bed spray paint, plastic sheeting, and rubber. The moulds needed to be impenetrable, not droop under the weight of resin soaked fabric and ultimately completely removable. It also had to have no creasing or grooves, like with the cling-film - the resin leaked into the tiny grooves of the cling film, so that when it cured it was near-impossible to remove as the resin had almost been Velcro’d to the plastic wrap.

Each petal once cut, hand painted with fabric dye, dried, soaked in resin, and fully cured. Had to be cut, sanded and sealed before attaching to the garment. A unique element of the flower petals, is that the fabric is made from discarded bedding sheets. Initially used as a toile fabric, but after experimenting with different final fabrics, no fabric held up to the integrity, dyeing ability and lightness of the sheeting - so the cotton sheeting was used.

Placement of the petals is also fundamental to the wearability of the corset, resin doesn’t bend, so multiple toiles of petals and their placements had to be done to find a way that the corset can be taken on and off, while not harming the external structure.

A great deal of hand beading was done on the skirt. The skirt is made out of a beautiful silk dupion, with the grain-line going across, to allow the slubs to look like grooves in a stem. The beading was meant to further highlight this, with copper and gold tones appearing at the point of decay for the lily. Further beading was done to form the anthers, using 0.3mm wire as the base, to make them self supporting and 3D. The same technique was used for the roots surrounding the shoes heels.

I wanted the look to have an other worldly beautiful decay, which had to be gold. I experimented with gold leaf and contact foil - both leaving undesirable effects. I settled on gel nail polish and metallic pigment that is buffed into the gel surface. This also allowed me to create texture, which was particularly helpful to create the mud splashes on the shoes.

The entire piece was constructed at home and on my garage floor, which was particularly challenging having multiple variations of curing petal prototypes everywhere!

I went into this project knowing how to construct and pattern cut the skirt and corset, as well as basic beading. The rest, even down to the hot-fix crystals was brand-new, learning on the job experience. I didn’t have a great deal of time, being only me, so a lot of this project was quick-paced ‘that didn’t work, quick what’s the solution’ mentality.