Clothing collection made from sound for London Fashion Week
Using a different sense to share a clothing collection
London Fashion week opens today, and designer Constanze Bachmann has created a collection purely out of sound.
Instead of physical and visual clothing, her piece ‘No Wear’ uses sound to communicate her designs and challenge how audiences view the female body.
It is intended to give the audience a sense of wearing clothes and their weight, being enrobed purely through hearing rather than seeing.
Studying an MA at London College of Fashion, she wanted to bring something different for the college’s first appearance on London Fashion Week’s official schedule.
What’s expected
The collection ‘Synaesthetic Sleeves – No Wear’ will see Contanze playing with sound boards as she creates sound silhouettes live on stage.
Using sounds that she has made and pre-recorded, she will create a live sound symphony revealing her designs physicality through music.
Contanze tells us: “I dress the audience through subsonic vibration and cross-sensory association, I will shape pre-recorded sounds into sound silhouettes in front of them”.
It uses aural experience and sound thinking, rather than visual experience and image thinking.
Changing the fashion experience of clothing on a body from looking and being seen, to listening and being heard.
“I challenge how physicality and wear-ability can be achieved with sound as a material”, she says.
In her collection, she uses sonic materials to form synaesthetic sleeves that capture the aesthetics of fashion and expose themselves through bodily reactions.
A tactile experience that can be felt on and below the surface of the skin due to the sound’s physical qualities.
The designer added: “Sight is the most dominant and biased sense; fashion heavily relies on sight as a form of communication, and I wanted to find alternative ways to share what I design.
“My non-physical silhouettes are experienced through music and to be perceived, decoded, grasped, and rebuilt by the consumer through his/her own senses.”
The process
Constanze began with designs of a clothing collection she wanted to communicate through sound, alongside lots of research she transferred the design information from vision to sound and haptic.
Haptic uses technology that stimulates the senses of touch and motion.
She tells us: “I used a cross sensory and speculative design process, transforming visual information into sound materials, patterns, and shapes.
“These sounds then stimulate sensations, emotions and haptic experiences for the audience just as traditional clothing would do.”
Lots of female and feminist collaborators were part of her research and initial design process, she wanted to integrate female voices into her work to amplify shared experience.
She analysed initial artwork and design’s colour ratios, movement, saturation, textures, and shapes, then composed and translated findings into sound, sonic vibration, rhythm, frequency, pitch, and amplitude.
“I translated images through a colour note chart, and this process revealed the aesthetic through the medium of sound”, she says.
Her work looks at stepping away from conditioned views and beliefs, looking at female identity, social reflection, and sensory perception.
After realising she viewed the female body and fashion with an internalised conditioned patriarchal gaze, she wanted to challenge societal constructs.
Constanze added: “My narration is about visualising an aesthetic for the ‘monstrous female identity’, which are female characters that are angry or sexually aggressive and seen as negative threat to the order of things.
“I wanted to visualise them in deromanticized way and move away from western patriarchal preconceptions.”
The Aim
Encouraging consumers to a new way of looking at the fashion female body, Constanze’s goal is to create an intersectional, identity experience.
She tells us: “We live in a patriarchal world, how we view females and fashion tends to be through an internalised patriarchal gaze.
“My aim is to free audiences and myself from this biased view. It’s not the only way to step away from patriarchal fashion system, but it’s my attempt.”
The performance is set to be a unique experience, she created illustrations for each sonic silhouette but says everyone’s visual representation will be different.
Living in the era of the metaverse inspired her idea, alongside wanting to challenge social constructs she explores the journey between real and digital worlds.
Constanze said: “Each consumer will have own associations and emotions they form so how the audience experience the design will be individual.”
“Shifting realities means our interactions and access to fashion is constantly changing, I want to create an immersive wearable experience capable of fluid transitions between these realities.”
London Fashion Week
London Fashion Week is running from 18th-22nd February.
It’s a clothing trade show showcasing over 250 designers to an audience of media and retailers, taking place twice a year in London.
Contanze will share her piece this evening along with the rest of the MA students and the college. There is a public showroom at Victoria House Basement in Holborn on Saturday.
Alongside live performances, the five-day schedule also shares digital shows including catwalks, live streams, collection launches & brand films.
Constanze tells us, “I wanted to create something that’s unexpected, I think I’ve done that.”