Student styles put feelings on the outside

Friday 28 February 2020

Two Hautlieu students have organised a ‘fashion show’ with a twist, encouraging others to wear their hearts on their sleeve to break taboo around mental health.

Opening at Liberty Wharf at 16:30 today, the 2020 Young Arts Show will be featuring a series of costumes and artistic works made of fabric illustrating emotional difficulties that can blight lives both young and old.

The concept – named ‘inVISIBLE’ – was the brainchild of IB students Lili Huckson (18) and Victoria Viera (17). 

As part of their studies, the pair had to come up with an active personal project, and were keen to inject their creativity into it. 

Pictured: One of the outfits on show.

“We wanted to do a fashion project because we thought it would engage many of our peers, not only in the design process,” they told Express. 

“We came up with the name inVISIBLE as we want to make mental health more visible as many people don’t express their emotions and they don’t talk about their feelings or problems enough.” 

The students had special tuition on the creation of their costumes from Hautlieu pupil Kyle Moody, whose graduate collection featured in 2017 London Fashion Week and is currently working on a couture collection. 

His aim was to introduce students to the world of fashion design through workshops, which involved developing themes into fully-formed ideas.

Pictured: “We are hoping for people to walk away from our exhibition... hopefully realising that mental health is not a taboo topic."

“Collage work and draping fabric on mannequins helped the students visualize their final design ideas. From this point we focused more so on the technical side of construction, workshops focused on the fundamentals of pattern cutting and garment construction (meterage, grainlines, seam allowance), which then progressed to more complicated techniques such as dart manipulation and contouring,” he explained of the creative process.

Students “less confident with the technical side of pattern cutting”, meanwhile, were encouraged to “ to re-purpose old garments and lengths of material”. 

The result has been a number of bold dresses ranging from vivid red drapery to rough-textured neutral pieces.

Islanders will be able to see the works in person this afternoon at Liberty Wharf. 

Lili and Victoria added: “We are hoping for people to walk away from our exhibition amazed with the incredible work students have put in to make the pieces and hopefully realising that mental health is not a taboo topic, we should be more expressive with our emotions and feelings and we are hoping that our exhibition portrays this message through the creativity of the outfits and artwork.”