For your Viewing Pleasure: Vaporwave Rum
What makes these digital garments lingerie?
This is a good question, and honestly, the answer is far more complex than a simple response describing its function, musing on its aesthetics, or describing the material elements. Even if we look as lingerie in history, it has both evolved and remained the same in different elements. In an interesting developments of societies and culture it has meandered its way into, and through various social cultural discourses, been associated with professions, personalities and attitudes, it has found a home a place in the western wardrobe as everything inbetween hidden foundational undergarments and aesthetic outerwear made to be seen garments. But where then does digital intimate apparel fall. In a really simplistic sense, these digital intimate apparel pieces that I have made for my digital exhibition are lingerie because I made them, and thats what I designed them to be and the patterns are adaptations of basic lingerie shapes. But this is of course an oversimplification and does not encoupas the consideration that went into, contouring the body, the materials, the theme and the garment design development.
As with many a creative endeavour this collection started with a theme, the theme of Vaporwave, I was particularly inspire by the difference in what body norms in art were in Greek and Roman statues compared to contemporary art, but I wanted to include a summery Caribbean festival element in the patterens and colours, thus this combination led me to a Vapourwave. I began exploring colour pallets through simple images, which are on display in the space alongside the garments.
I made the avatars for the collection myself, inspired by an article by Neil Kirkman I read about the garment materiality focus versus the model focus.
I experimented with combining curved internal seams while creating digital patterns and drapping material, not just as part of design development but also to work out the limitations and abilities of the different software I employed. I later exported garments from Clo to blender to enhance, edit, and pose. I hope in my next collection to explore animation. I decided to render 2D images as I had issues exporting the iridescent materials out of blender, these I then uploaded to Spatial.io , ensuring to observe their garment minimum coverage policy which mainly ficuses of covering buttocks, genitalia and nipples.
if you are interested you can get a free a ticket to the July 2023 launch event but the space will most likely be available after the launch too.
As I start my PHD you can expect to see more of my work in the area of digital lingerie design within virtual spaces.
