Dickinsonians with a flair for the fun side of fashion are the focus
of our cover feature for summer. You’ll
encounter designers Sophie Simmons ’94 and Kate
Duvall ’04, company
co-owner Scott Beaumont ’75,
marketing professionals Jeff Funk ’91 and Marisa Jacobs ’78, boutique
co-owner Debbie Dickson ’82,
and photographer Doug Inglish ’91
and get a peek at how the presidential style of William G. Durden ’71
evolved.
Shock and Skin
Kate Duvall ’04 takes a daring approach to couture
By Barbara Snyder Stambaugh
The lights go dark, then pulse. Images flash, streak and
burst. Music pounds. Leggy women cruise the catwalk in fashions that are outrageous and
strangely romantic, technical yet luxurious, made of material beyond cloth, beyond reason.
The kinetic spirits of legendary people and places are invoked: Alexander McQueen’s
London, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Paris, Elsa Schiaparelli’s world. There’s
shock and skin, the unexpected and visceral—it’s high fashion at Dickinson.
This
spring, studio-arts major Kate Duvall ’04 built her senior-project fashion
show from the ground up, creating every element herself.
“It took particular courage
to choreograph an event of this scale,” says
Barbara Diduk, professor of art. “I was completely impressed, not only by the imaginative
fashion but by the Gesamtkunstwerk [the complete work]—the lighting, music, video
and still photographic images in the work, the total performance.”
True, the show’s
ambiance was artfully and energetically executed, but it was the clothes that stole the
show.
“I like to shock people,” Duvall says. “I call my designs ‘illegal
fashion’ because they are so outside the norm, and I incorporate traditionally
illegal art like graffiti.” (Duvall paints graffiti onto her models’ bodies
and projects video images of graffiti onto some of her gowns.)
“My work is an anti-fashion
statement, born out of a love of fashion. I’m
interested in the human body as depicted in contemporary art, in sculpting the body with
fashion, in the negative connotations of exposing the body. Clothes can be revealing
but still tasteful. I want to see all the possibilities.”
For Duvall, the design
possibilities include anything one does not expect to find in a fashion show. Trash bags,
for example. She makes edgy, neoteric garments, carefully crafted from black or white
plastic bags, bungee cords, aluminum foil, rolls of yellow “caution” tape.
She’s turning fashion inside out, exploring a fine line between entropy and elegance.
Even
her methods are unconventional. Duvall doesn’t like sewing machines, preferring
to work by hand. She seeks models of varying body types from among her student friends.
She takes existing clothes apart and adds new dimensions. And she’s very hands-on,
creating smeared makeup pallets for the models and big, teased hair that she says is
a little bit “trashy.”
“I mean that literally,” she says. “I
attach little bits of tin foil, etc., to their hair.”
If Duvall’s fashions
are all about willfully violated expectations, then her plans for after graduation are
unusual too. One would expect an aspiring fashion designer, graduating with a minor in
French and a self-confessed love of haute couture, to head for Paris. But after working
a stint at the Baltimore Museum of Industry as a museum teacher, Duvall hopes someday
to land in London.
“I went to London on a family vacation over winter break and
fell in love with it,” she says. “I’m curious about what I’ll
design in the future, about how I’ll break the rules.”
But she might even
surprise herself. Turns out that there’s another side to Duvall’s
unorthodox sensibilities. She’s also a painter … a completely conventional
painter.
“I do portraiture,” she says with a laugh. “Fashion is my abstract
outlet. By day, I’m a realist. I just have this funky alter ego.” |
