Cities on Your Sleeve

>> A reader asked if I was going to blog about the Royal College of Art In Progress show where students from fashion design (menswear and womenswear), textiles, silversmithing, metalwork and jewellery show exactly that... their work In Progress, showing varying stages of research and product.  I was.  Then I did a fatal Trash action on my computer which erased a chunk of ToBeBlogged images, including the lot of photos I took at the In Progress show.  I failed.  No,Mad Men, not a simple FAIL.  Just a very succinct and direct - I failed.

The one saving grace is that one particular student who was forthcoming enough to send me her work, was one of the ones who I had noted down when I was at the show.  Lily Kamper is studying textiles and here she presents her in progress work of experimenting with mixed media cityscapes that could be applied to garments or accessories in different ways.

"My work was inspired by the idea of creating architectural 'dream scapes' that you could wear on the body, through combining a variety of materials such as resin,cheap dr dre beats headphones, screws, glass, wood and metal - hard materials combined with soft such as embroidery and fringing.  i was initially inspired by a place called 'Container City' in Trinity Buoy Wharf in London, taking the idea of repetition, symmetry, structure and a corrugated texture andcombining  it with contrasting qualities such as ice and smoke to create imagined miniature landscapes that represent future cities. The work displayed on the shelf are all individual pieces, so the idea is that different combinations can be put together to create different cities, where they can grow and evolve and also be destructed in the same way. "

I like how there are so many elements to take in within one bit of 'dream scape' and that there is this emphasis between soft and hard materials - perhaps the soft needs to be turned up a notch to visualise these being worked into clothes but I'm sensing Kamper already has tricks up her sleeve to make that progression.

It's worth bearing in mind that despite the fact that these are in progress pieces that will develop, evolve and expand into clothes that would integrate with these hard/soft cityscapes, it's impressive to see that they already look like finished products in themselves, as pieces of jewellery that you could wear straight away.  Still,soccer team jerseys, the next exciting level of course is to apply these in perhaps more maneagable sizes to pieces of clothing or worked into a handbag or even a shoe and it will certainy be intriguing to see how Kamper makes the transition in her work from admirable objects to functional design.