Bowie
Brief: Produce a piece of imagery that investigates one of the following themes:
- Give back life
- Memories
- World A meets world B
My initial thoughts for this project was to get a second hand coat, and collage memories and personal thoughts, ideas and messages about my family and friends into the coat, with the intention to give back life to the garment and relive memories of my friends and family. However about a week into the project David Bowie passed away, this shocking news affected me and I felt I had to show what I was feeling. So I changed my project, instead of creating a coat with memories of my friends and family, I would do it in memory of Bowie. I would use the same format of collaging into the coat, but it would be based on a different subject.
After buying a coat from a charity shop, I gathered multiple different second hand fabrics and materials that I would stitch into the coat, this in turn would represent the multiple different fashion appearances that Bowie made over his life. In addition I planned to paint onto the jacket lyrics, albums, quotes and facts of Bowie, this reinforces the memories that Bowie left behind for so many people but also expresses my personal connection with Bowie. Having painted and collaged the whole jacket, I felt a visual of Bowie was needed, just to reinforce the memories and to express my personal thoughts on Bowie further. So I sourced an image taken from his "Heroes" album, which is one of my personal favourite's, and manipulated it and printed it of to stitch into the back of the coat; I also typed up more lyrics and printed them out onto cotton. The combination between digital print outs and hand stitched and hand painted elements, works really well; there is an equal balance of texture and tone which displays fluidity throughout the garment, but the hand painted letters add a sense of roughness and raw emotion to the piece, which reinforces and highlights my personal emotions that reflect Bowie.
After finishing the piece I wanted to create a look book for it. I chose to shoot the look book in an underpass at night, because that particular location supplied interesting lighting, which meant I could play and explore with the aperture and exposure, but ultimately the under pass offer's a mysterious and emotional atmosphere, similar to that of Bowie. I decided to take the image's in black and white, because with the interesting lighting highlighted the jacket really well, and the contrast between the two tones enhances depth and 3D imagery, which in turn reinforces character and emotion. I edited a white box over the models face, because it references Bowies "Next Day" album, which is another favourite of mine. The images below displays the look book, highlighting the final coat, and the link is to youtube where I have uploaded a video look book.
