daybreak arts collaboration

For my sophomore year fashion show, we collaborated with daybreak arts here in Nashville, tn. daybreak arts is a nonprofit organization that gives people who are experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity by giving them a space to create art, express themselves. and give economic opportunities. each designer was given an artist for daybreak to create a garment for a piece of their art at the designer's choosing. The Piece of art that i chose was a black and white drawing of someone head's with words associated that had to do with what was happening in the world and how the artist was feeling towards that.

as soon as i looked at this piece of art, i knew that i wanted to involve the triangles and the swirls into a more upscale dress, while still conveying words like "love", "hopeful", "hatred", and "violence." these words were some key words to me when developing my concept. I knew i wanted to keep the dress black and white, but i was contemplating a few different ways to convey this internal struggle the artist is seeming to have. i eventually landed on somehow incorporating yin yang into the dress, since yin yang is chaos and order that form into object and every day lives. I wanted the curve of the yin yang symbol to swirl down the center front and center back of the dress, leading into slits. i wanted the top of the dress to come into a triangle shaped neckline. one side of the dress was to be white and the other black, but i was thinking of how i could add a piece to the dress where i could flip flop the black and white, to convey that chaos and peace sometimes crash into each other more viscously. that's when i decided to add a ruffle layer onto the dress and put the colors on the "wrong" side of the dress.

Here is the mockup of my concept with the model who wore it on the runway. You can see there were a few adjustments that needed to be made in order to fit her.

these images show the top and bottom before the finishing touches were added, as well as, the final ruffle. it become a two piece outfit rather than a dress. the swirl on the dress bottom was a bit difficult to truly curve instead of going into a straight line, it took a lot of clipping and cutting of the inside seam along the curved line.

Here are the final images on the day of the runway. the second image is the model and i together backstage of the show. this is still one of my favorite garments that i have made! every step of creating this dress was so much fun and watching it walk down the runway was an experience i will never forget, as this was the first item i have made that walked down a runway!