Filmic Cool

One of my main design inspirations come from film. My great loves are 80’s and 90’s films, the era of effortless, filmic cool, where the characters would nearly buckle underneath their own personalities, their own personal styles. Crime and sci fi were my major inspirations, especially urban Italian styles. Gangsters from the Sopranos, utilitarian yet cutting edge space station outfits from Alien and Akira bathed my eyes with intricate detail.

But the inspiration doesn’t end there. Like anything in media, we have to pay attention to more than individual, constituent parts. A general style, a set design aesthetic, all tied into my love for design. For example, the soup of architectural influences colliding in Blade Runner set my mind ablaze with a lot of possibilities, where the elegance of neo classical detail could be mired by the hedonistic, far-future lifestyle, garbage and graffiti. The plastic, the neon, the makeup, they all coalesce into a great fashion soup.

I invite you to a similar exercise with me. Try to find some piece of media that inspires you, whether it be a painting, a story, etc, and try to see it from another angle. Like a visual synesthesia in a matter of speaking. How could a feeling be squeezed into some sort of a visual form? How could an emotion translate into a color? A pleat? A stitch? Broaden your mind and see what you can do.

When I design a dress, this is how it starts. What is the mood that I want to achieve through a particular piece? I try to imagine the man or woman or person in a certain setting. When that is accomplished, the article makes itself on my piece of paper. Try it yourself.