Evvan Chmielewski MFA Applied Craft + Design Thesis 2023

For the good of the company is a wardrobe of garments that subvert the conventional silhouettes of the ‘modern professional’. The body of work explores multiple avenues of decentralizing and reassessing established forms through clothing design. It disrupts a sense of order and control in tailored garments. The clothes are inspired by styles derived from white collar professionals of the early 2000’s. These silhouettes have impacted the ways I view success, order, and stability. Deconstructing these forms poses questions of how to exist in the professional world. The classic blazer, collared shirt, blouse, A-line skirt, and trouser are modernized through a dissection of their patterns, intervening on the foundation of construction and challenging the predictability of how the body exists in these settings. These styles represent artifacts from childhood memories and the ways that I understood convention in adult dress and survival. The work draws on the tradition of conventional attitudes and the distinguished professional. Using muslin, the tradition of clothing design processes are kept in tact, acknowledging the value in stability- providing an alternative outcome, one that is unexpected and renewed. The decentralized form asserts that there is no definitive right or wrong both in the process of making clothing, dressing, and attitudes on professionalism, multiple systems exist at the same time.

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MFA in Applied Craft + Design Thesis Works