adnan agha
interdisciplinary designer & artist
enter the mantis
as an elective at risd, i chose to pursue apparel design. when asked about this choice by the fashion professors, i explained that i think of architecture as design at scale. through this lens, other modes of design also become accessible and interrelated.
in architecture, we are designing an interior and exterior with a constructed space within. the same can be said of developing a garment, just that its scale is close to that of the human body.
cloth thing
as i thought about the human relationship to clothing, i dwelled on the way it separated us from animals, just as it made use of them as its source material, literally and metaphorically.
many of our first clothing items were simply the skins and fur of other animals, but before the endoskeletal creatures, there were exoskeletal beings: insects whose skin retains its shape and glistens with the rigidity of armor. despite this stiffness, they still reveal moments of transparency and light, features i accentuated in my work.
patterning
using an existing jacket as a reference, i traced and cut each piece of the pattern out and converted them to a digital counterpart in illustrator.
materials
after experimenting with a variety of fabrics, from vinyl outer layering to flowy layers of tulle, i came up with a collection of several layer combinations that each captured light slightly differently. each panel was then created by serging together these layers into a single piece.
wearable lightness
the final piece was extremely light and transparent but still had a mild stiffness to it from elements like the screen door material. it captured the light beautifully, with bits of glistening sparkle throughout the blue tulle.
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