A silk gown drapes over a body, its folds cascading like water, admired for its elegance. But when skin gathers in soft creases, it is met with critique, concealed beneath layers of fabric meant to smooth and hide.
Why do we celebrate one and shame the other?
Why are such natural textures treated as flaws?
Examining ourselves, we scrutinize the intricacies: stretch marks, scars, marks. We romanticize the folds in fabric but why not the ones of our own bodies? Within fashion, the concept of uniformity reigns almighty. We are enamored by ideas about how garments will, or should, apply to form.
When the clothing becomes an intermediary between the space and the subject, the body begins to exist within the language of the natural world: curving, aching, arching, stretching, curling, flexing.
Artist Michaela Stark turns bodies into sculpturesque works through corsets, elastics, ribbons, and other restrictive elements. Her story reclaims the narrative of this stereotypically shamed perspective. The body exists as a canvas: the form of a garment is incomplete without it, so is the body not the art itself? Is the garment a husk without an occupant? How does it change when it is given life?
Seams Of Self is an exploration of these garments as talismans and the wearer as a sorcerer: the spirit offered through movement and constriction, the form in its relationship to space, and what remains of the garment even when it ceases in presence.
Creative Direction, Styling, Digital Photography, & Words by Paige Albert
Film Photography by Cameron Colling
Co-Stylist & Video Direction by Juliet James Weinhold
Co-Writing, Stylist Assist, & CD Assist by Coulter Clifford
Stylist Assist & CD Assist by Gianna Schwartz
HMUA & Talent by Venus Evergreen
Videography by Oliver Hummel
Music Composed by Brendan Shaw
Video Coloring by Annie Cater