An international fashion research project exploring the 'craft of use'

Alternative Dress Codes

The choices we make about what we wear are influenced by life present, lives past and our ideas about our future selves. Expressions of values, aspirations, heritage, understanding and the physical shape of our bodies build a rationale for dress that transcend narrow commercial views about fashion. Instead they give us broader perspectives that honour our reality as well as our aspirations; and connect our psyche with our fibre and fashion choices.

Low metal

"I have a job at Bard being a computer professor. The sub part of Bard that I’m involved with is the Bard Prison Initiative… I go into prisons and teach basic computing skills. However I learned quickly that you have to create sort of a personality [through your dress] that’s authoritative… It was also important when I was putting different ensembles together, that I try to be as low metal as possible, or if the metal exists, pure metal, because it makes a lot less cumbersome when I am going through the metal detectors. Sometimes very fine pieces of clothing that had tiny little clasps set them off, and I've had things like large earrings or the ring that I have, that never go off at all… so [in a process of elimination] I just go through one day and find out what works and what doesn't and start pairing down."

New York - January 2013
Photograph by Ellinor Stigle