About Me
Hi I'm Imogen and I am a UWE Fashion Textiles graduate!
My vibrant textiles take inspiration from Queer fashion and culture. Making references to the Club Kids and Leigh Bowery who used their fashion and aesthetic to create new identities and escape from reality. Exploring ideas of gender, sexuality and escapism these pieces are here to take you away from the mundane.
I want to challenge ideas of gender and explore a colourful self expression in a vivid colour palette full of embellishments and expressive prints. There is no subtlety here, I am bored of boring and want to bring some playful but symbolic textiles into this grey world.
INSPIRATION
My initial inspiration started from thinking about how to disrupt ideas of the male gaze
through exploring ways of expressing gender and looking at queer fashion references. The Club Kids and Leigh Bowery have been a major source of inspiration for these collections and how they chose to live and present themselves, finding the Clubs a safe space to be their most authentic selves and I wanted to create collections that captured their spirit.
Following on from this I began exploring how queer fashion can be used as a form of escapism. The Club Kids and Leigh Bowery would use the club scene events as a form of distraction from who they were in their everyday lives and gave them a chance to be as authentic and expressive as they wanted. From here I developed some fluid and expressive textiles which are designed for simple androgynous garments that can be worn by anyone!
MY WORK
PORTFOLIOS
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DETAIL
I converted my digital drawings into embroidery
From creating my own drag look, 'Ready to go nowhere' and then photographing myself doing chores I was exploring how dressing up can be used to escape the mundane. This design was developed from my first hand research into a digital illustration. I then converted this illustration through the Wilcom Embroidery software into a digital embroidery design which was then stitched out. From here I added some beading to represent the dirt... even a drag queens dirt is glamorous. This is part of a series of digital embroidery designs which I am working towards developing to create a textiles art piece for the 2021 Hand and Lock embroidery competition.
“Fashion, where all girls have clear skin, blue eyes, blonde-blown wavy hair and a size 10 figure... STINKS” Leigh Bowery
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