DETAILS
Free, no booking required
MonW Studio
172 Wellington Street, Collingwood VIC, Australia
DATES
Sun 18 May 12 – 4pm
Sun 25 May 12 – 4pm
Replica Project Wardrobe Test reveals methods for fashion design extracted from costume production for naturalist theatre and feature film making. It cites source material including text (scripts, screenplays and print media) and artefacts (archival garments and historical costume), to hack, remake, replicate and recount their histories. In doing so, the project investigates the slippages between the production and presentation of costume and fashion.
The project explores replication as a method to reincarnate primary source material. In this way, the replica embodies its own aura in the same way as the original. The wardrobe test is a costume design strategy which is explored as a tool to flip the order of design and the role of film in the fashion system. The application of these design and production techniques borrowed from costume practice, offer novel screen-based fashion design methods and alternate propositions of fashion film. This allows for outcomes that produce delayed reactions after initial oversights to notice the unusual; a double take.
Participants
Mandy Nichols, Replica Project
Mandy Nichols is a Melbourne-based designer and founder of Replica Project. Mandy's training in costume for film, theatre and haute couture informs a multi-layered practice interrogating the complex connections between fashion collected in the museum, costume designed to depict a character and contemporary fashion. With over twenty years of industry experience Mandy has worked as a design assistant, cutter and maker for feature film, television, theatre, opera, dance and haute couture, with credits including Baz Luhrmann's Australia and The Great Gatsby and Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant. She has worked for Parisian haute couture atelier Caraco Canezou producing garments for Givenchy and Schiaparelli. In 2015 she received the Winston Churchill fellowship to develop her expertise in corsetry and couture techniques within the archives of the Victoria and Albert museum, Balenciaga museum and Kyoto costume institute. Mandy has worked as a fashion consultant with wardrobe NYC, managing the design studio and wholesale showroom production during New York and Paris Fashion Week and Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles. Mandy is a graduate of RMIT University Masters of Fashion (Design) where she is current PhD candidate. She has received the prestigious Australian Fashion Foundation award in 2019, the Australian Fashion Week Next-Gen award in 2021 and the Victorian Premiers design award in 2022. Mandy's work is presented at design events and symposiums including Melbourne Design Week, Melbourne Fashion Festival, Australian Fashion Week, The Swedish School of Textiles, De Montford University, UK and A Shaded View of Fashion Film (ASVOFF), Paris.