Experimental/multi-media studio : 3rd year studio, RMIT University, Bachelor of Design (Fashion)
This multi-media studio was interested in the intersection between our digital personas and our 'real world' identities. The curation of a digital persona on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, as a whole separate and often quite different in thought and action to the 'real world' individual fascinated me. I came to interpret that curation as a kind of process of 'refracting' the individual; of 'bending' their identity to fit the coloured and exciting life they wished to portray to the wider world through the lens of social media.
With this understanding, I sought to track and capture processes of real-world and digital-world refraction. Utilising mouse-tracking programs to capture refraction of my own identity (editing Facebook profile, photoshopping profile pictures, embellishing linked-in profile), I plotted a 'map' of digital refraction. I also used photography to capture paths of light refraction through glass pyramids, and found similarities in the jagged refracted paths of the light, and the jagged pathways of my mouse as I refracted my digital identity.
I then wished to transpose this multi-media discourse of identity refraction into a fashion-based outcome. I wished to apply refraction processes to an everyday or workwear garment trope, so as to demonstrate the refraction and elevation of the everyday or banal that is witnessed in social media identity refraction.
Utilising the paths that I had traced out in my mouse-tracking and prism refraction experiments, I traced out polygonal shapes in photoshop on photos of ordinary white business shirts, and then twisted, or 'refracted', those traced shapes to form new silhouettes and garment facets.
Once I had created a number of these refracted garment designs, I took them to the stand, draping to recreate the digitally-refracted garment in the real. The multi-media design process allowed me to develop a unique design platform, and outcomes that represented a cross-over between the digitally refracted and the real-world, and make a commentary about the strange extravagance of the identity refraction process.