THERE'S THE ART of fashion, and then there’s fashion as art. In this issue we’re highlighting 13 Chicagoans who think about the body less as a hanger than as a springboard for personal expression, resculpting or renovating the human form with garments and accessories that for the most part definitely can’t be worn with jeans. They include sculptors, painters, an architect, and a graphic designer and range in experience from student to professional. Their inspiration comes from all over the map—ichibana, civil unrest in Haiti, tripe, Victorian girlhood—but they don’t clobber you over the head with their big ideas. Instead they speak their intentions softly, encouraging viewers (and confident dressers) to decide on meaning for themselves. --Liz Armstrong
FOR HER FINAL project at the School of the Art Institute, senior Abigail Glaum-Lathbury chose the theme of tripe. “It’s got this incredible honeycomb pattern,” she says. “I like [taking] something that’s very disgusting and making it into something exquisite.” She made hundreds of latex casings from a plaster mold— they do look disconcertingly like the floppy slices of offal sold in the supermarket— and applied them to fabric or sewed them together. In one piece the sewed-together pieces are wrapped around a corset, giving the garment what Glaum-Lathbury calls an “awkward, jolting movement.” A lot of her clothes move strangely: one dress has an exaggerated, uneven bustle, upon which is layered a long skirt made of elastic, resulting in a motion that Glaum-Lathbury describes as “wiggly and noodly.” Her spring ready-to-wear collection uses more-accessible shapes: a pair of long, narrow walking shorts have pintuck details that create parallel lines down the legs; the fabric of an asymmetrical sleeveless white top ripples across the torso, gathering around the body like a cloud.
Available at: Habit
--Heather Kenny
Photo: Heather Murphy
DANNY MANSMITH SHUNS the serger—a sewing machine that binds raw edges with thread, making hems easy and quick. “I like homespun kinds of things,” he says. The intricate, Asian-influenced designs for Mansmith’s label, Scrap, have a grandmachic appeal, quiltlike and homey, but they’re also impressive feats of craft, beautifully finished inside and out.
Mansmith, who used to sew for another local designer, deals in the soft arts: paper-and-cloth dolls, fiber sculptures, and clothes. “I think of it all the same,” he says. “Some people focus on the fashion aspect, but I’m not a fashion designer.” He lasted a semester and a half at the American Academy of Art downtown before dropping out and teaching himself garment construction by taking a seam ripper to jeans and thrifted suits.
Mansmith likes recycling secondhand materials. Once, after an artist he knew threw out a canvas he’d been painting on, Mansmith rescued it, dyed it, cut and sewed it, and attached sleeves made from an army blanket, turning it into a jacket. For a 2004 exhibition in a Wicker Park loft he made a men’s suit out of paper and fabric and sewed pieces of broken LPs all over it. Much of his clothing has an organic feel—he plays with silhouettes by drawing out bulbous wads of fabric in unexpected places. “I like things to look haphazard but lie right,” he says.
Available at: Habit, Surrender
--Liz Armstrong