What happens when you send a costumer obsessed with historical accuracy to Design school? Well, in 2004 I found myself accepted to the University of California, Davis Design program and over the next two years I hit all the highs and lows. I'll be honest... I never thought of myself a fashion designer. At best I'm a copy-cat... I take existing portraiture and extant clothing and, well, copy it. I don't start from scratch and above all, I don't design modern clothing. However, what I do love is a good challenge, and UCD offered me exactly that. So, what does happen when you send a historical costumer to Design school? You end up with a Senior fashion line that looks like what you see above.

In all honesty, I have a love/hate relationship with this collection. I resented it for most of the time I worked on it, in fact. It went against everything I stood for. I wanted to make pretty clothes, not monstrosities, which is what I felt this line had become. My professor relentlessly urged me to keep "pushing it" and I grugingly did so, the whole time feeling a horrible twisting feeling in my gut as I pushed and pushed; I just couldn't imagine this collection representing anything of myself, let alone my love of costume history.

Then, one day in early March, in a fit of exhaustion and suffering from a touch of ennui, I decided to stop taking myself so damn seriously. I'd spent the bulk of my life taking a ridiculous amount of pride in construction techniques, period fabrics, hand finished touches, and what I'd never done was just cut loose, and here was my opportunity. I finally had permission to just say to hell with good taste and beauty and be crazy. It was no longer about the details, but the impression. That's the point where I started to appreciate this project for what it was. Looking to the historical modes that had always inspired me, I took them to the edge and extrapolated from them shapes that were then combined with modern articles of clothing. After presenting an in progress outfit, my professor said how much she loved that I'd created these ghostly silouhettes of women's fashions of the past and beneath were these very modern pieces. That's where the title "Ghosts of Fashion" came from.

"Ghosts of Fashion" will debut at the Picnic Day Fashion Show, April 22, 2006. Stay tuned for more photos and the research paper!

 

Special thanks to Katie Van Camp for taking the pictures!