Seattle clothier and artist Sophy Wong has by no means shied away from crossing disciplines.
Her expertise within the native trend scene has persistently coloured outdoors the strains, incorporating components like 3D-printed sculptures, cosplay inspirations, and programmable, LED-loaded electronics. The outcomes make for a stunning Instagram finger-swipe of colours, lights, and varieties.
Her first-ever look at Bumbershoot is equally on-brand: you possibly can name Symbiosis a “trend present” in the event you dare, however the best way Wong tells it, that label solely scratches on the floor.
Skilled dancers, whose backgrounds embrace ballet and Mexican people dance. A ’90s trip-hop soundtrack. Characters who’ve returned to Earth after touring by the far reaches of house for 400 years, with wild outfits to match. And a “story bible,” which Wong says is subliminally pushed by “all of the sci-fi and anime” she watches however formally namechecks a sci-fi legend: “the Isaac Asimov concept that civilization continues,” Wong says. “Regeneration, rebirth, hope.”
The story of Symbiosis is instructed largely by seven signature Wong outfits, that are all impressed by spacesuits. “They’re a know-how barrier that retains us away from our surroundings,” Wong says.
The local weather disaster prompted Wong to reimagine the normal house go well with, sufficient in order that she needs to have anybody her trend present have their very own Planet of the Apes second of realization: “The twist is, you [may one day have to wear these] right here.”
Whereas a few of Wong’s most spectacular works to this point have leaned on LED lights and thick plastics, she’s choosing extra natural designs for Symbiosis. It’s a daytime present, so Wong is skipping her traditional gentle preparations; daylight would in any other case drown these out. Her typical reliance on 3D-printed supplies stays intact, however at this present, they’re sewn into deliberately floral and Earth-toned prints. In a single visually placing contact, Wong stitches the shimmering gentle bounces of satin right into a 3D printing materials referred to as “bifurcated filament”—in brief, a sort of plastic that has a distinct, complementary, shimmering coloration on both sides. The consequence appears bioluminescent.
This present’s method to fabrication is fitted to its sci-fi idea, the place organic varieties develop onto and turn into one with any apparel. In Wong’s imaginative and prescient of future Earth, spacesuits and native biology might fuse to turn into indistinguishable: mixed organisms, adapting to outlive on a quickly altering planet. By slowing the pace of a 3D printer and stretching its printed, corn-derived materials simply so, Wong is ready to produce glowing, barnacle-like cones and different ephemeral “growths” that dot a lot of her costume designs.
Smaller, self-contained, 3D-printed tasks have been Wong’s first steps into an eventual ardour for trend design. A few decade in the past, she started dabbling with 3D printers on a lark outdoors her day job as a graphic designer: “3D printing activated the type of digital workflow that I used to be already snug with in 2D,” she says. Her aspirations advanced from small, simply printed tasks like earrings to totally blown cosplay creations, and the latter excited her in an identical method: “[Cosplay is] a design problem to translate another person’s imaginative and prescient, another person’s 2D design, right into a bodily type, right into a actuality.”
Her rising ardour for cosplay led to determining find out how to function as an all-in-one design store—and maybe extra importantly, to take a step again from the method and embrace cosplay’s hard-to-pigeonhole spirit. “Now I am pulling from [so many disciplines] to create one thing, and I would like it to dwell in a complicated house between: Is that this trend? Is it costume? Is it artwork? Is it one thing new? That’s extra snug to me than making one thing that somebody appears at, and so they come to a simple reply.”
Wong continues to problem trend conventions together with her shoulder shrug on the catwalk: “I discover that basically boring, personally. And I knew that I needed to do one thing totally different, from the whole inside veins of the present to the surface pores and skin of it.” Wong is a dancer, and casting native dancers for Symbiosis was a pure addition to the present’s storytelling ambitions. “Dancers are born to carry out,” Wong says. “You may give them an idea, an concept, and a personality, and so they can run with it.”
The story, then, for anybody studying forward of the present: Earth’s residents fled the planet roughly 400 years in the past, however failed to search out wherever that was extra hospitable and try to return again. Two astronauts went on a pilot mission, solely to fade. Wong’s story begins with a 3rd astronaut, sporting the present’s most “traditional” spacesuit, returning to the planet, the place she has discovered that the opposite misplaced astronauts have turn into the titular “symbiotes” who’ve tailored to the modified panorama. Ultimately, 4 different “tailored” life varieties come into contact with our hero, and whereas they’ve blended extra totally with a modified, otherworldly panorama, they nonetheless share practical and aesthetic lineage with the least tailored astronaut: mesh respiration patches; “vestigial” helmets within the types of ornate collars; and The Fifth Factor-like belt harnesses.
“Over time, these creatures are discovering a strategy to survive, as a result of we’re offering a substrate and sources for them,” Wong says. “They’re doing the factor that crops and creatures within the atmosphere do: they soak up the toxins, scrub the air, and do all of that nice stuff. They’re rehabilitating the planet.” For Wong, then, her dream is for viewers to rethink our relationship with “protecting” gear on our real-life, quickly altering Earth: “Perhaps it’s much less of a barrier to guard us from the atmosphere and extra like, might it assist us merge with our surroundings?”
Because the present lacks outright narration, Wong’s imaginative and prescient does extra to unify the present conceptually and visually than it does to shove a transparent ecological message down viewers’ throats. And that sense of development and evolution inside one present might proceed on with extra reveals to return—as Wong already has an idea board smothered in spacesuits, plot concepts, and sci-fi inspirations (together with a Star Trek: The Subsequent Era picture of Deanna Troi, Whoopi Goldberg, and Gates McFadden, who Wong calls out as “the holy trinity”).
“I need to do all the remainder of these [show concepts] finally,” Wong says concerning the different scribbled ideas on her studio wall. Bumbershoot known as at simply the proper time to get an preliminary idea beamed from her creativeness to our planet, she suggests. Then Wong gestures on the fuller board: “That is my universe that I need to create. Symbiosis is only one planet.”
Sophy Wong presents her assortment, Symbiosis, in Bumbershoot’s Style District Saturday, August 31 and Sunday, September 1 at 5:10 pm.
