the golden fish: the butterfly dress

Thursday, July 10, 2008

the butterfly dress

a very long time ago i had a girlfriend who would have worn this but you know what, i still think it’s cute even without knowing someone who’d wear it! the concept and eventual development of this lovely dress came out of the interactive telecommunications program of nyu.

itp describes itself as “a two-year graduate program located in the tisch school of the arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives. perhaps the best way to describe us is as a center for the recently possible.” how clever is that - “the recently possible”. i can think of a lot of people in my life who i think that moniker would apply to!

so i love this kind of approach - first there’s the concept . . . driven by big questions like “what is fashion? why do we wear clothes?” both worthy questions that connect even to this most suburban of families as my children are driven to wear clothes but not just any clothes - fashionable clothes that make a statement. why do they need to do that? the answer is not the usual toss-off - “to conform”. it’s actually more complex now as kids are acutely aware of the larger costs of clothing, beyond the pecuniary and into the manufacturing, the cultural language that is spoken by the graphics on the clothing, the statement that non-conformity makes. conforming to your understanding of your self.

then there’s the prototype . . . .

then the practicalities and the gradual integration of technology. . .

which leads to more practicalities and more integration of technology . . . . followed by the lovely messy period which is my favourite phase of any project that relies on the integration of thinking, doing, pushing envelopes and redefining what is commonplace. . . .
until the work emerges as the becoming thing of beauty that it is . . .

which with refinement. . . care . . . and hard work . . . results in a thing of beauty that expresses the gentleness and technological savvy of a woman who is “gorgeous and cutting-edge in the butterfly dress, catching looks and conversation as the butterflies on her dress flutter with her heartbeat and rise to greet strangers as she reaches for her glass.”