riosities. It also connects to the Victorian era’s obsession with cataloguing the natural world—an era when curiosity cabinets, zoological collections, and botanical studies attempted to contain nature’s wild diversity. This drive to observe, classify, and aestheticize life forms reflected not only a desire to understand the natural world but it also revealed a deeper connection between humans and other species as the evolutionary theory was formulated. At that time popular periodicum Punch’s almanach was publishing series of fashion illustrations named Designs after Nature. These illustration, featuring women in strange animal like gowns, were made to riducule fashion frivolities of that era, equating fashion trends with biological features.
The collection sees fashion itself as a kind of bestiary: a collection of curious, evolving forms that mirror the era from which they emerge. Just like living organisms, fashions thrive, adapt, and change. With the collection I attempted to express these natural evolutions through the language of knitwear while interpreting forms found in nature. I developed surface textures that evoke bone, skin, or feathers suggesting a shared language between bodies and garments. Some pieces begin with references to historical dress, but these anchors dissolve as the garment is being made, destabilized by the logic of the material. I like to think that they become “animated” through the process of making.
The collection is knitted using a variety of manual and industrial techniques through which knitting becomes a generative method, a way of sketching—transforming simple structures into sculptural forms that challenge conventional ideas of garment construction and knitwear. The focus lies in the materiality of the garments and the intuitive, process-led act of making.