Wearables
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Archisuit
Sarah Ross' Archisuit (2008) is a series of four jogging suits made to resist specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.
According to Ross:
There are an upwards of 20 different styles of benches on the sidewalks of Los Angeles. They each serve a function, usually related to transportation and waiting; though they could serve many other functions such as aiding in socialization or resting. For this project I have tested the resistant behavior of each type of bench. To understand the resistant behavior of such benches is to first examine the behavior of human bodies and our surrounding environments.
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Platforms
Norene Leddy's Platforms (2006) is an integrated system of platform-style shoes, digital media and online services. They feature six-inch silver leather sandals embedded with a media player and LCD screen, GPS transmitter and an audible alarm.
Self-labeled by Leddy as a “social sculpture,” Platforms is a conceptual tribute to the Greek goddess of love, a practical object for contemporary sex workers, and a medium for public dialogue. The design for the shoes is based on historical research and interviews with contemporary sex workers. According to the Leddy, the shoes “combine the rich mythology of Aphrodite with the concerns of sex workers on the streets: safety, advertising/promotion, and community.”
As a means to increasing sex worker safety, each sandal is embedded with a loud electronic siren along with a GPS receiver and silent alarm that wirelessly relays the wearer’s location to sex workers’ rights groups and/or emergency services. To help sex workers promote and advertise their services, the shoes’ LCD screen displays a variety of customizable videos and graphics. A speaker in the back of the shoe plays audio tracks of environmental phenomena connected to Aphrodite—ocean sounds from her birthplace, waterfall tracks from the Baths of Aphrodite in Cyprus, etc. Lastly, the Platforms project includes an online component that provides sex workers with an email client, calendar, “problem client” blog, and chat rooms.
See also:
- The Ahprodite Project: Platforms
- Chelsea Art Galleries: The Aphrodite Project: Platforms
- YouTube: artfuture :: Norene Leddy - The Aphrodite Project
Refuge Wear City Interventions
Lucy Orta’s Refuge Wear City Interventions (1993-1998) combine urban architecture and social activism with fashion design. Her wearable shelters can be described as “survival suits” that function poetically and politically to provoke dialogue and awareness about the connected issues of poverty, homelessness, war, and migration. Her first Refuge Wear prototype “Habitent” (1992-1993) is a tent-like shelter/garment, designed for displaced people who are forced to carry their belongings and shelter with them as they migrate between or within cities.
Through her research with the homeless, Orta learned that many of them were fearful of living in permanent housing or shelters as a result of “traumatic and alienating circumstances they had experienced living with other people." This inspired Orta to appropriate the street itself as an extension of the home by designing mini-environments that people can wear, relocate, and live in without relying on permanent and institutional shelters.
Over the course of five years, Orta produced a series of works she dubbed “Body Architecture,” that doubled as clothing and temporary shelters—often for multiple inhabitants. These works focused increasingly on diverse communities of people displaced by poverty, famine, and war. By fusing fashion with architecture, art, performance, philosophy, and politics, Orta’s work functions as a social provocation—a symbolic and political protest that artfully exposes public indifference and excess while also revealing the isolation and indignity endured by those trying to survive in our invisible culture.
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