Tuesday 14 October 2008

FOODWEAR: the Athens Fashion Week Workshop

First, let me apologize for the delay. I returned in Volos last night only to discover that all the craziness of last week and the 4-hour road trip took their toll on my health: I have caught a cold, nothing serious of course, but enough to keep me off my laptop for one more day. So, now that I made my excuses, back to our topic of the day. To briefly recap, the 8th Hellenic Fashion Week Workshops started last Monday and ended with a very impressive show on Sunday evening. I've already posted pictures and details from our first, second and third day in the FOODWEAR workshop. To explain it in the shortest way possible, the goal was to produce fashion inspired by food, using the architectural way of thinking. We worked in groups of four all week.This is us! From left to right: Katerina, me, Penelopy and Sapfo. I already knew Sapfo from Volos architecture school and had witnessed the amazing things she can craft, but Penelopy and Katerina I met there. Penelopy - who shares the same name as me, Lopi is just a nickname - is studying architecture too, but in Thessaloniki. She was a real sweetheart and so valuable to our work. And Katerina, I've already mentioned her before, but I would like to say it once more: It was a real pleasure meeting her. She truly is an amazing person, so wise and mature for her age, but also very fun to be around. I just hope she will soon get over her non-technological phase and set up an email account, so we can keep contact the digital way.
But, lets get back to our project: Inspired by the food we ate on the first day, and specifically the stuffed tomatoes (yum) we decided to work on the "food you stuff with other food/food you use to wrap other food with" concept. We made the observation that in tha case of stuffed tomatoes, the stuffing gets molded into the tomato shape, like the corset molds the body into its own shape. The exact opposite is the way dough gets its shape by wraping it around a sausage when making small sausage pies or loukanikopitaki, if you prefer the greek word. So we decided to work on that and produce a garment that will "reflect" the shape of the body by describing its curves. We decided to use stripes made from non-stretchable material that would stay the same while they followed the vertical curves, so the eye would read the shape behind by seeing the gap between the stripes. We used cardboard that we cut into bands and connected with elastic to make the first dress. You can see it modelled on Sapfo's curves:
But we wanted to try different materials and techniques as well, to see what other results could be produced. So, we sewed a white foam sheet on a very elastic black fabric using lots of parellel stitches and then we cut between them to make stripes. When worn, the black fabric stretches around the body, but the stripes remain unstretched, thus producing the same effect as the previous dress: describing the curves optically using the gaps between the stripes.

And of course, we had to present the results of our hard work on Sunday's show. We had our hair and make-up done by the MAC make-up artists that also did all the models for the shows and we had to walk the stage like a catwalk. Talk about scary! But the audience and our professors were ecstatic about our performance, so we must have been good.
For more pictures from all the projects and the show visit the official blog of the FOODWEAR workshop here. Thank you for your patience all this last week. More pictures from the Fashion Week shows will be up tomorrow!

4 comments:

Archo Pischou said...

bravo girlz! para poly kali douleia! k fysika top models stin pasarela..tha ithela na to eixa dei live, alla tha arkestw se polles fotos..k sti new york fashion week!

Elena said...

Well done!!! Simply amazing!

ShoppingTherapy said...

from fashion blogger to fashion designer to fashion model! what's next?

Anonymous said...

Wow, look at you go! Looks like an amazing collaborative experience, with phenomenal results. Congrats, beautiful!