The Grid: Connection, Balance, and Entropy
Beyond fashion is a show that is hosted every year by the Vignelli center archive. Designers are invited to create collections based on a prompt related to the Vignellis’ design philosophy. This year, the prompt was The Grid. My group came up with three looks based on the idea of a strict grid breaking down over time. We came up with 3 words to design around: connection, balance, and entropy
Sketches
I started out with several disconnected ideas for pieces that I wanted to try making and then fit them together into a cohesive look. In the end, it was 3 that stood out:
A vest made like cloth armor, held together with few seams and many strings.
An asymmetrical skirt with a mechanism to tie it up to one of many drawstrings at the top, inspired by side-saddle skirts.
a sweater made from ripped up lace table cloth and thin linen yarn knitted into a pattern.
Color grid knitting pattern I created for the sweater
The almost 100 feet of ties I had to sew for the vest
Process
Knitting in class
Using boiled cabbage as a natural purple dye (baking soda added for a deeper purple
The resulting mottled blueish purple color from the cabbage dye threw a wrench in my plans. I had already suspected that the skirt I had made first was not out of material or in a color that matched the other pieces, but this made it impossible to ignore. I decided to buy new fabric and remake the entire skirt one day before the show.
Below you can see comparison videos with the first and final iterations of the skirt.
Wet blocking the finished pieces on pizza boxes (didn’t have foam)
Drying the dyed pieces. They began to fade and get blue spots immediately for some reason
