I broke up with my ex-boyfriend before going to university. He believed lovers should be similar, so that they can share their mind and emotion to each other immediately, while I disagree. Then I realized that we do love each other, but we had nothing in common. The gap between us made me started to think about the falsity of love. Does soul mate exist? Does perfect lover exist? Is love a natural of artificial thing? I doubted that maybe lover is just a beautiful lie from our ancestor to avoid loneliness, to cover the truth that everyone is an independent individual on this big blue earth, to entice their children and grandchildren to procreate.
It trouble me for a long time.
When we fell in love, we seems like does not have any requirements to our lover, in fact, we still hope them could be better whereas we will never tell them. No one have everything in common, people are always looking forward to find a perfect one to love while the so-called perfect lover does not exist at all.
I want to show the despair of love throughout this project, using metaphor from paintings and traditional story to make a costume for Miss Havisham from Great Expectation. She is a tragic figure who was marginalized and alienated. Her spirit was shattered because she was abandoned on the wedding day. Then she wore her wedding dress to the end of her life, refusing to leave home and lived like a ghost without any sunshine. Her gothic lifestyle and tortuous love life make her became a classic eccentric character. In the book, the description of this woman is desperate and gloomy. She looks so beautiful in her wedding dress, sitting among dusty dried flower, jewels and the wedding cake that covered with cobwebs and insects. She still looks forward to her lover even she is so hysterical and resentful.
For the pattern, I want to use red spider lily which symbolized despairing love in some Asian area as an element to make a print or painting on the fabric, then stitch some metal piece and these fabric on clothes to make the costume seems like a bloody dress with red spider lily. But I hope the main body of the wedding dress could be white to show the pure love, so that only the heart part would be covered by red decoration, which means the heart break.
In the ancient story, the person who was shot by Cupid’s arrow would fall in love with others. I think the bloody heart part on the costume should be impaled by a Cupid’s arrow, which represents a negative meaning —love become despairing when we fall in love.
I went to V&A to visit the exhibition of Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams. His using of delicate textile, unique silhouette and special cutting impressed me a lot, thus I might reference some silhouette from him to create a new thing.
To be continue…
June M enuJ 