We’ve all seen fashion designers’ sketches and the garments that they inspired, but Edda Gimnes puts a twist on the traditional design-sketch pairing. The young Norwegian designer doesn’t draw sketches that are supposed to look like garments—she makes garments that look like her sketches.
“Instead of starting with the pattern, I start with my illustrations and then make the pattern accordingly,” says Gimnes. In this way, she privileges the sketches. Sketching is an art, but it’s also often seen as a step in a process—a means to an end. We make sketches to plan grander projects, and those projects are then considered more significant works than the sketches that initiated them. But in inverting this hierarchy, Gimnes’ designs privilege process over product, and show that the early stages of a work can be just as thrilling as the end.
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“I draw almost everything with my opposite hand, to get that naive and hand rendered look to it,” Gimnes tells The Creators Project. Her black-and-white works make the models who sport them look like they’ve stepped into an animated world of jagged pen strokes against clean, white paper.
“I transfer my illustrations onto white canvas clothing using digital printing,” Gimnes writes. “Pairing simple-cut outfits with black brushstrokes… my clothes appear as if animated, accentuated by oversized paper-esque gloves, hats and platform sandals.” When styling her models, Gimnes also extended the black lines of her sketches to their skin, drawing inky lipliner and pencil moustaches. It creates the effect of the dresses’ ink leaking onto the models, turning them into sketches, too.
To learn more about Edda Gimnes work, click here.
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