Can clothing accumulate experience and memories over time?
MaterialByProduct
MaterialByProduct rejects the fashion industry status quo. In a trade where collections are typically produced biannually, only to be superseded a season later, MaterialByProduct offers year-round continuity and timelessness. And despite the mass production and waste characteristic of the industry, this luxury fashion house is testament to the power of thinking differently.
Over the past ten years, MaterialByProduct’s artisan and director, Susan Dimasi, has been dedicated to developing systematic techniques for marking, cutting and joining cloth to create exquisitely feminine pieces. For Dimasi, the process is integral to creating a distinct MaterialByProduct design language. “The garments are more than clothes; they are compositions in space,” she explains. “For the wearer, the experience of being immersed in the clothes is probably more important than the experience of being admired in them.”
In 2012 MaterialByProduct unveiled the Bleed project, a series of garments marked by hand with a coloured marker, which ‘bled’ into the fabric when activated by the body heat of the wearer, accumulating detail, and value, over time. Emotional states such as love, passion, frustration or anxiety trigger increases to body temperature, which in turn had a catalytic effect on the MaterialByProduct cloth. The final result for the fashion client is not merely a wearable garment, but a unique and intensely personal record of their psychological journey through life.
For CUSP, MaterialByProduct presents Embodiment, the second project to explore the notion of ‘bleed’. Two public figures have been invited to wear a MaterialByProduct garment and publicly document their emotional experiences online via social media and blogs. Once the journey is complete and the fabric has bled, MaterialByProduct will digitally scan the unique pattern and create a new textile design from which diffusion line MaterialByProduct clothing will be made. Only after purchasing the dress and cracking open the sealed envelope will the identity of the original wearer be revealed.
