Ella Mustaniemi

Most garments today are encountered as flat images on screens. We are surrounded by more images than ever, yet that may not have made us better at reading them. As a result, similar aesthetic codes recur across visual platforms. When the flat image becomes the primary format through which fashion is consumed and evaluated, there is a real question about the kind of design it produces. This MA thesis asks what this saturation does to the individual designer’s judgement. The design process draws on bricolage, cutting apart existing garments, reassembling fragments, and printing image search results on paper. I pulled references from different decades and styles, without imposing a fixed hierarchy. Every image, material and form arrives with a history. What interested me was whether that history is actively chosen, or whether it has already shaped the eye without me noticing. "Working with paper, hand-woven copper, woven jacquards and leather, the collection turns toward materials with their own communicative histories. These materials ground the decisions that image culture tends to make unstable.’’"