Last week I launched the first half of my graduate collection A Twisted Love Affair and so far we have had a great response, I couldn't be happier with the results of the collection as well as the behind the scenes video! Now it's time to launch part two of the collection, are you ready? When I was preparing and getting ideas down for what kind of shoots I wanted to go for as well as different looks to coincide with my theme and concept, I decided quite early on I wanted to use a court room, the reason for this was that I wanted to use the court room to express Harley Quinn in her original form. I looked back into the history of real life harlequins and what their role in court was which I found really interesting and the more I read the more I could see how much of this new found knowledge has influenced my collection. One of the most fascinating pieces of evidence discovered was how the real Harlequins of court had a lower status than a Jester but were always the center of the King's battle plans, which if you look at the comic books Harley Quinn is always the center of the Joker's plans and he does use her the way a king would. It was whilst reading and researching I learned more about the fabrics that Harlequins would wear such as the diamond print which I decided to laser cut for this coquettish creation.
The diamond print refers to the outcasts of society and some of the uniforms that have been assigned to them throughout history, such as diamonds for fools or stripes for the insane or criminal. As fashion evolved the diamond print has found it's way into modern usage and has been endlessly re-imagined into the the checks and hound tooth patterns that are so familiar today. You can see this clearly in the suit below which draws its palette from The Joker of the DC comics but uses the hound tooth check to ground this fictional character in our real world. This isn't just a suit for the Joker but for anyone who might find themselves, willingly or otherwise, swimming against society's tide.
A stroke of luck came when I decided to pursue the University of Derby's court room as the setting for one of my shoots. This location quickly developed into the inspiration for the finale of the the short film A Crime of Fashion that has been created to accompany this collection and incorporates all the designs and creates an entirely original narrative from which to view my work. It drew on our original ideas and built on the work of the illustrator Drew Askew who I commissioned to create a comic for this collection, with the intention of allowing my audience a range of mediums through which this collection can be interpreted. This collaboration has proved to be hugely successful and has gone a long way to bring my designs to life and express the violent, chaotic, amoral and at times charming nature of these two characters that have inspired me so much.
