The Catsuit is part of Alisia Wood’s bachelor graduate collection, which deals with subcultural exchange and collective identity within urban societies. The collection plays with the paradox of striving individualism through collectivism in forms of self-positioning and scene-hopping. The Collection contains around 23 pieces and is based on her thesis which explores the origin of subcultures, individuation, working class backgrounds and first generation students. Wood specifically focused on the way relations between these concepts can form new identities and generate new subcultures by their respective mixings.
For this particular garment Wood refers to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man drawing and connects the symbolic shape to her idea to fill the gaps, that happen when you stretch out all your extremities, with material and connect them within an elliptical form.
Content wise, she critically deconstructs his problematic concept of “ideal proportions” of the human body and tries to compare this physical concept with psychological concepts such as identity and personality and how to measure those rather abstract concepts and if that is even possible at all when our bodies are in the way of it.
The elliptical parts stand metaphorically for different subcultural melting pots and the catsuit stands for the individual and to which extent it is either passively or actively part of it.
The colour is based on subtractive colour mixing, where you get black when you mix all the primary colours in equal parts. The unmixed primary colours represent the different singular subcultures that transform by their respective mixing into a new identity of colour, a new melting pot of subcultures.
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