Fashion gone Awry!

Fiona Carswell, Smoking JacketThe other day I went to the end of the year show of the ITP masters program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Much of the work fell in the category of wearable technology—what most caught my attention were humorous pieces playing with the notion of function and functionless. Fiona Carswell’s work fit this category, with garments characterized by a rather dark humor, as with a Smoking Jacket with visible lungs on the front of it, which blacken over time as the wearer exhales cigarette smoke through a system of tubes; meanwhile, her Malignant Mole Bikini develops dark moles as the wearer spends time in the sun!Andrew Schneider’s Experimental Device for Performance is also alternatively humorous and unsettling. It consists of a pair of identical helmets from which a screen is held. The screen alternates footage in real time of the mouth of the the person wearing it and the mouth of the other wearer, whose voice also comes through the device. This substitution bestows a rather confounded feeling on the viewer, especially as the disembodied mouth is larger than its original. To find out more about these two projects and many others you can consult the ITP show site…Francesca