MORPHOGENESIS:
Material Vitalization
How Can Material Innovation Bring Biomorphics Into Fashion?
How Can We Reinvent the Relationship Between The Most Primitive and The Most Sophisticated Life Forms?
What is the new profile of luxury menswear under the circumstances of sustainable fashion and industrial digitisation?
Related Project: Preliminary of Biological Design in Fashion through the Phenomenological Approach
Fashion Accessories: MORPHOGENESIS
The background of Morphogenesis derives from my reflection on the contemporary beauty criteria. It then casts a projection onto the men's knitwear, where my physical design works sit in, as discarding of hegemonic masculinity.
Regardless of how progressive modern people look for deviant beauty, the emphasis on 'natural' beauty has never disappeared (Maccannell,1987). Within modernism in the early twenties, artificial beauty and beauty conformity has spread globally with consumerism's pneuma (Victoria,1996). Nevertheless, the worship of natural beauty still survived but deconstructed. Cooperated with the ideals of democracy, the post-modernism era's beauty activity celebrates more independent efforts than a sterile beauty outcome (Klepp,2010).
The same routine does apply to fashion as well, in the reason of its significance of building one's appearance. However, menswear fashion usually has different conformity to respond. It has much more to do with the visible gender identities than the beauty intendancy (Edwards 1997). Therefore, when men's fashion developed with the generation Z & Alpha, men are freer to manipulate their masculinity visuals, yet within the circumstances of gender ideals (Barry 2018). According to the case studies from Ben Barry on 'Men's Hybrid Masculinities Through Dress' (2018), contemporary men are configuring their visual gender identities through building up the wardrobe with selected fashion pieces in the light of current hegemonic masculine figures. Bridges and Pascoe (2014) gave the theoretical explanation of how men appropriated elements of contextual gender identities and combined them into hybrid masculinities due to the changing buoy of contemporary male's Figures. In other words, contemporary masculinity in fashion could be deconstructed. Starting from this idea, thinking of the transformation of menswear fashion as an analogy of current beauty criteria confirmation, I am arguing to free contemporary menswear from hegemonic masculinity. Within Morphogenesis, the menswear fashion concept is purified into pursuing men's beauty through clothing. I am trying to challenge the idea that fashion pieces are industrial inorganic compounds, aiming to implant biological design approaches into a fashion collection's esthetical programming. Thus, beauty will be natural scientifically.
Identified me as an informatics engineer specializing in the algorithm-aided design area, Morphogenesis will be a concept model of a digital fabrication collection, which response to the sustainable fashion principles on minimum waste and low-cost customization. I also specify Morphogenesis as having an interdisciplinary approach both on research and realization process. Hence, the answer to the first research question can be established by biology research. The second question requires further studies on applying biology research outcomes to textile manufacture.