Material By Product (Susan Dimasi and Chantal McDonald), SOFT HARD07. Photographs: Paul Knight Creative Direction: 3 Deep Design
Fashion shows are invariably accompanied by sounds of some kind. Typically it will be whatever is breaking sales records or used to break sales records, but some designers have engaged live bands or choirs or even the sound of silence to forge the right mood. For SOFT HARD 07 Material by Product tuned into the weekly 3RRR radio quiz for unpredictable, anti-rhythmic noise to accompany their most recent in-house show.
Susan Dimasi and Chantal McDonald form the two-person fashion label launched in 2002 and collections have now been sold in Moscow , Milan , Tokyo , New York and Melbourne . SOFT HARD 07 was staged in McDonald's Prahan backyard, transformed into a runway with rough masking-taped lines to indicate where the crowd of students, curators, lecturers, fashion professionals and other designers should fall away. The appearance of a single red-haired model signalled the beginning of the parade. In a tribute to the topsy-turvey approach to fashion promoted by Material by Product, the model posed naked except for a thin pair of pale underpants. The designers, who eschewed the usual role of directing from behind the scenes, instead took centre stage with the model and stood at either end of the catwalk flanked by assistants.
Material By Product (Susan Dimasi and Chantal McDonald), SOFT HARD07. Photographs: Paul Knight Creative Direction: 3 Deep Design
The model, moving up and down the catwalk, was dressed, undressed, redressed and addressed by the designers who's hands worked quickly. Dresses and tunics were placed over the model's head at one end of the catwalk, only to be whisked off (leaving her naked once again) and then rearranged on the body in a new way. This open process deconstructed the traditional fashion parade's desire to highlight the finished object and revealed a second use for arm holes or an alterative snap-fasten method for a belt, blousing highlighted on the front of one garment would be re-fitted on the body to sag and sway in another direction. All of this underscored a collection of clothing that is multidimensional, structurally complex and firmly positioned in a trajectory of design most closely associated with labels such as Maison Martin Margiela.
A palette of predominately viscose, georgette, cotton calico, kangaroo leather and sports mesh became the link between flowing and tailored forms that take the jacket as a point of design departures. McDonald has said ‘Its not so much what we make, but how we make it' and here we find the core of Material by Product's craft. It's about how analysing and interrogating the process that cloth will undergo to become a garment, rather than simply sewing pieces of fabric together – a moment highlighted when a one-armed, kangaroo leather jacket, emblazoned with tattoos of smoke-like swirls, was taken off and placed on the ground, becoming a stand-alone sculptural work. A pool of tan leather on the concrete path. Only when put in direct contact with the body did this piece of material became a wearable object. At work are the tangible results of considered choices about when, where and how to cut fabric. Materials are treated in ways that best cohere with their particular characteristics and waste is a new design opportunity, fed back into a practice based on systems.
Material By Product (Susan Dimasi and Chantal McDonald), SOFT HARD07. Photographs: Paul Knight Creative Direction: 3 Deep Design
This very conceptual approach to fashion design also means that the pair have benefited artistically from collaborations with others. Photographers Justin Smith and Paul Knight, who have been given free-range to imagine images that catalogue the collections, do more than merely represent clothes. Instead, the garments are taken on a narrative journey, and at times disappear from the documentation altogether. One of the central images used to promote SOFT HARD, for example, is of Dimasi's partner locked into position with a professional contortionist with no fashion in sight.
Throughout the parade the designers would occasionally meet on either side of the model at the house's backdoor step. When the garment at hand was a very full calico skirt it seemed traditional roles had been reversed: in the past, it would have been the two women dressers who wore the plain, calico skirt while the subject of their attention was fitted out in her finery. The message is not that the average woman needs helpers to get into her Material by Product ensemble, rather that these designs ask for the wearer to make choices and to find new, even unexpected ways, of wearing clothes, and to consider the act of dressing itself.
Low key decorative elements played a central role in this collection but were surprising in their manufacture and placement. What first appeared to be screen printed dots turned out to be tiny white liquid paper and black Artline pen circles applied by hand to form a matrix of abstract shapes that mimicked the look of Pearly singers' costumes, becoming a city night-time skyline or the face of Jesus. Reportedly the pair spent much of last winter huddled over, trying to keep warm while daubing the fabric, forced to keep the studio windows open to lessen the heady stench of toxic stationary.
Like all good parades, the flow of SOFT HARD progressed toward increasingly complex ideas and experiments that found a focal point in tattooed Kangaroo leather. Whether worn on its own or woven through sports mesh, the haptic qualities and unique sheen recalled human flesh and a spectrum of associations from Japanese Yakusa to the sickly skin suits run-up by Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs . The leather had undergone the needle of a local professional who attended the show, sporting tattoos on his fingernails and later fielded questions from fascinated onlookers. The show concluded with the garments being whisked off the Hills Hoist and taken into a backroom, sheltered with dustcovers, away from view. It had been the ideal suburban setting for clothes that a week later would be shipped to the glamorous world of Paris fashion. Such a dynamic seemed at the heart of SOFT HARD which had thrived on contradictions.
