Towards A Highly Localized Theory of Drip
May. 7th, 2025 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlMachinery, Catharsis, Technology,
Ragtag, Transcendent, Slapstick...
—Underscores, Locals (Girls like us) [with gabby start]
I've been painting clothes and accessories on and off for a while now, but have recently stepped it up and offered them for sale to the general public rather than just for myself, friends, or giveaways at cons.
My artistic North Star here is to capture the feeling of furry and anime conventions, whether on the approach as you see more and more people clearly dressed for it, or the radius around it where there are people at Chipotle or whatever in full cosplay. You could call the style "chuuni formalwear," not literal cosplay but definitely playful costuming. I've stacked my own wardrobe in this direction over the past few years, and have felt much more myself for it. It also helps me be less rattled when I have to be around people wearing noxious political symbols - sure, some guy in the deli's got a MAGA hat, but I think my gay-club-flyer collage shirt wins the matchup.
Key Inspirations:
Yinka Shonibare does excellent work with textiles and fashion, with a signature theme of "headless mannequins doing ridiculous shit while wearing classical European fashions cut from Dutch wax." Those fabrics - English and Dutch imitations of Indonesian textiles that are now staples of West African and Black-diaspora fashion - are a versatile metaphor for the messiness of credit and culpability in a globalized age. I especially value how his work is often funny in ways other than "tastefully dry," a rarity in fine art; I love the materials list of Revolution Kid (Fox), and how sheer petty bitchiness is both the joke and the horror of Scramble for Africa.
Helvetica Blanc has a delightful style of "Occult Corporate Memphis," which has influenced a lot of the tone of my "occult-industrial" pieces. The numinous-yet-mundane, the garb of technicians jaded to otherworldly forces.
Nomad Complex is a brand that's ubiquitous at furry cons - the only places they set up physical storefronts - but which I don't think I've ever spotted being worn anywhere else. I have mixed feelings about their homogenizing effect on con fashion, but I can't deny that it's a well-earned success, or that I've taken stylistic cues from them too. (I finally caved a while back and got their Rise 'n Grind tank, but I want to balance the scales by wearing it anywhere but cons.)
Dustrial has carved a niche of tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk/industrial style, some of which is eye-rolling but a lot of which genuinely fucks. They've influenced my use of "visual technobabble," glitch effects, and recreating digital imagery in physical media across the board.
There are too many other inspirations to name, but one of the most important ones is just paying attention to peoples' fashions day-to-day and keeping an eye out for the glow of someone wearing their favorite outfit.
Some Core Principles:
It Should Fuck Hard At A Glance: I have a signature-glyph I've started using on every piece, but it carries no cultural weight and I don't expect it to. I can't get away with charging $50 for a sweatshirt with just that logo, so I want it to always take a backseat to whatever else the focus of the piece is.
I've also found a frustrating trend in researching streetwear brands, where the womens' section is often both smaller and has less interesting graphic design. As a woman with a tricky-to-clothe body who likes the gonzo shit, I want to rectify this in whatever small ways I can.
The Radical Acceptance Of Taking Some Ls: Every piece has either a willful choice I would've done differently now, or an outright mistake. Sometimes a stray drop of paint can be corralled into a happy accident, sometimes not, but working by hand in an irreversible medium requires you to accept a certain amount of imperfection. Honestly, it's been good for me to internalize this even when I do have access to Ctrl-Z.
Thematic Balance: When laying out design elements, there's a spectrum from "belaboring the point" to "throwing random shit together" that can be tricky to navigate. CJ the X's video with the Menswear Guy helped me realize why my un-cohesive designs fell apart: "dress is not an art project" in the sense that fashion is a series of social languages, and even if you're working in a very niche dialect it should still say something. (For context, right now I am wearing a Replaceable Parts-themed overshirt; I do not expect anybody to ever get the reference, but I had fun working in the design language of high-end Gamer Merch.)
So, I want each piece to have a clear throughline that still invites some playful ambiguity; two or three motifs orbiting each other, each adding something to the conversation without becoming a shouting match or talking past each other.
Orientation: I try to only put text running along a sleeve on the right side, so that it reads right-side-up and moving away from the body when the arm is extended. (Since starting this, I've noticed a lot of famous brands that put text upside-down on the left sleeve and it tilts the fuck out of me. Looking at you, Calvin Klein.)
However, there's some fun potential I haven't explored yet with putting left-to-right text on the right sleeve and right-to-left text on the right; maybe I'd start with mirror-flipped English, since I don't trust myself to do accurate-enough Arabic, Hebrew, or Japanese.
Speaking Of Languages: A friend who plans to permanently move to Japan offered me a very nice Machine Girl shirt because she knows she'd be endlessly clowned if she wore something with that much nonsensical Japanese around millions of native speakers. My work doesn't have that problem, because the language I use on my designs is the ancient, undeciphered Linear A. Its glyphs range from "elegantly simple" to "what the fuck"; it feels both primordially human and strikingly alien; it is language as pure aesthetic playfulness. It is my liturgical language for my love of the eternal conversation of art, each piece a prayer that this will be re-deciphered someday and we can all laugh at how silly my text turned out to be. (It also lacks the Orientalism of extant Asian writing systems and the many political landmines of Norse runes.)
On the industrial pieces, I like the gag of very urgent warnings in an unreadable language. On the webcore ones, they can summon the dread of literally-undecipherable error messages or the joy of a whole new world of data. I like the lil' fish-guy I've adopted as a signature/logo, especially how it vaguely looks like an Icthys while being a strange, jagged creature that predates Christ by a millennium and a half.
This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender: As I said above, my body can be tricky to clothe in the styles I want. I'm 6'4" with broad shoulders and tits that cannot bear anything form-fitting. I've got size-13 feet with wide fronts and high, asymmetrical arches and insteps. I like accessories like scarves and bracelets that can fit on pretty much any size, but those only go so far for establishing a style. Bit by bit, I've found pieces that flatter my figure and have designs I like, but it's often been slow going.
These projects have also stirred up thoughts about the slipperiness of the term "visibly queer." Whether or not I count as such is almost entirely down to what I'm wearing that day and what the people around me are equipped to pick up on. (I'm not terribly interested in overt pride symbols, I'd rather just have outfits that there is no cisgender explanation for, but even that can fall flat to a lot of people.) I'm uninterested in performing most feminine social scripts, I have a very low bar for when trying to pass feels like apologizing for existing at all, and so I guess I'm de facto "boymoding" unless I'm literally wearing a skirt (and even that often isn't enough.)
So fuck it, if I'm no good at performing "woman" then I can at least perform "Stand user" or "spaceport engineer." If I'm speaking a language nobody understands, let me make that literal and have some fun with it.
What Next: I've done some independent tabling at parks nearby, but this Sunday is my first actual market event for this. I'm excited; I've got a good inventory on hand already, and some WIPs ranging from "sketch phase" to "nearly done." I hope to connect with more local artists too, since this has been good so far for internalizing a sense of "people seem to like me and my work, I should do something with that."
I have no plans to become an entrepreneur for this; I want to make art objects with a minimum of getting bogged down in bureaucratic backends. Maybe I'll end up working for someone else, keep an eye out if streetwear starts to feature more esoteric glyphs in the future.
Ragtag, Transcendent, Slapstick...
—Underscores, Locals (Girls like us) [with gabby start]
I've been painting clothes and accessories on and off for a while now, but have recently stepped it up and offered them for sale to the general public rather than just for myself, friends, or giveaways at cons.
My artistic North Star here is to capture the feeling of furry and anime conventions, whether on the approach as you see more and more people clearly dressed for it, or the radius around it where there are people at Chipotle or whatever in full cosplay. You could call the style "chuuni formalwear," not literal cosplay but definitely playful costuming. I've stacked my own wardrobe in this direction over the past few years, and have felt much more myself for it. It also helps me be less rattled when I have to be around people wearing noxious political symbols - sure, some guy in the deli's got a MAGA hat, but I think my gay-club-flyer collage shirt wins the matchup.
Key Inspirations:
Yinka Shonibare does excellent work with textiles and fashion, with a signature theme of "headless mannequins doing ridiculous shit while wearing classical European fashions cut from Dutch wax." Those fabrics - English and Dutch imitations of Indonesian textiles that are now staples of West African and Black-diaspora fashion - are a versatile metaphor for the messiness of credit and culpability in a globalized age. I especially value how his work is often funny in ways other than "tastefully dry," a rarity in fine art; I love the materials list of Revolution Kid (Fox), and how sheer petty bitchiness is both the joke and the horror of Scramble for Africa.
Helvetica Blanc has a delightful style of "Occult Corporate Memphis," which has influenced a lot of the tone of my "occult-industrial" pieces. The numinous-yet-mundane, the garb of technicians jaded to otherworldly forces.
Nomad Complex is a brand that's ubiquitous at furry cons - the only places they set up physical storefronts - but which I don't think I've ever spotted being worn anywhere else. I have mixed feelings about their homogenizing effect on con fashion, but I can't deny that it's a well-earned success, or that I've taken stylistic cues from them too. (I finally caved a while back and got their Rise 'n Grind tank, but I want to balance the scales by wearing it anywhere but cons.)
Dustrial has carved a niche of tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk/industrial style, some of which is eye-rolling but a lot of which genuinely fucks. They've influenced my use of "visual technobabble," glitch effects, and recreating digital imagery in physical media across the board.
There are too many other inspirations to name, but one of the most important ones is just paying attention to peoples' fashions day-to-day and keeping an eye out for the glow of someone wearing their favorite outfit.
Some Core Principles:
It Should Fuck Hard At A Glance: I have a signature-glyph I've started using on every piece, but it carries no cultural weight and I don't expect it to. I can't get away with charging $50 for a sweatshirt with just that logo, so I want it to always take a backseat to whatever else the focus of the piece is.
I've also found a frustrating trend in researching streetwear brands, where the womens' section is often both smaller and has less interesting graphic design. As a woman with a tricky-to-clothe body who likes the gonzo shit, I want to rectify this in whatever small ways I can.
The Radical Acceptance Of Taking Some Ls: Every piece has either a willful choice I would've done differently now, or an outright mistake. Sometimes a stray drop of paint can be corralled into a happy accident, sometimes not, but working by hand in an irreversible medium requires you to accept a certain amount of imperfection. Honestly, it's been good for me to internalize this even when I do have access to Ctrl-Z.
Thematic Balance: When laying out design elements, there's a spectrum from "belaboring the point" to "throwing random shit together" that can be tricky to navigate. CJ the X's video with the Menswear Guy helped me realize why my un-cohesive designs fell apart: "dress is not an art project" in the sense that fashion is a series of social languages, and even if you're working in a very niche dialect it should still say something. (For context, right now I am wearing a Replaceable Parts-themed overshirt; I do not expect anybody to ever get the reference, but I had fun working in the design language of high-end Gamer Merch.)
So, I want each piece to have a clear throughline that still invites some playful ambiguity; two or three motifs orbiting each other, each adding something to the conversation without becoming a shouting match or talking past each other.
Orientation: I try to only put text running along a sleeve on the right side, so that it reads right-side-up and moving away from the body when the arm is extended. (Since starting this, I've noticed a lot of famous brands that put text upside-down on the left sleeve and it tilts the fuck out of me. Looking at you, Calvin Klein.)
However, there's some fun potential I haven't explored yet with putting left-to-right text on the right sleeve and right-to-left text on the right; maybe I'd start with mirror-flipped English, since I don't trust myself to do accurate-enough Arabic, Hebrew, or Japanese.
Speaking Of Languages: A friend who plans to permanently move to Japan offered me a very nice Machine Girl shirt because she knows she'd be endlessly clowned if she wore something with that much nonsensical Japanese around millions of native speakers. My work doesn't have that problem, because the language I use on my designs is the ancient, undeciphered Linear A. Its glyphs range from "elegantly simple" to "what the fuck"; it feels both primordially human and strikingly alien; it is language as pure aesthetic playfulness. It is my liturgical language for my love of the eternal conversation of art, each piece a prayer that this will be re-deciphered someday and we can all laugh at how silly my text turned out to be. (It also lacks the Orientalism of extant Asian writing systems and the many political landmines of Norse runes.)
On the industrial pieces, I like the gag of very urgent warnings in an unreadable language. On the webcore ones, they can summon the dread of literally-undecipherable error messages or the joy of a whole new world of data. I like the lil' fish-guy I've adopted as a signature/logo, especially how it vaguely looks like an Icthys while being a strange, jagged creature that predates Christ by a millennium and a half.
This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender: As I said above, my body can be tricky to clothe in the styles I want. I'm 6'4" with broad shoulders and tits that cannot bear anything form-fitting. I've got size-13 feet with wide fronts and high, asymmetrical arches and insteps. I like accessories like scarves and bracelets that can fit on pretty much any size, but those only go so far for establishing a style. Bit by bit, I've found pieces that flatter my figure and have designs I like, but it's often been slow going.
These projects have also stirred up thoughts about the slipperiness of the term "visibly queer." Whether or not I count as such is almost entirely down to what I'm wearing that day and what the people around me are equipped to pick up on. (I'm not terribly interested in overt pride symbols, I'd rather just have outfits that there is no cisgender explanation for, but even that can fall flat to a lot of people.) I'm uninterested in performing most feminine social scripts, I have a very low bar for when trying to pass feels like apologizing for existing at all, and so I guess I'm de facto "boymoding" unless I'm literally wearing a skirt (and even that often isn't enough.)
So fuck it, if I'm no good at performing "woman" then I can at least perform "Stand user" or "spaceport engineer." If I'm speaking a language nobody understands, let me make that literal and have some fun with it.
What Next: I've done some independent tabling at parks nearby, but this Sunday is my first actual market event for this. I'm excited; I've got a good inventory on hand already, and some WIPs ranging from "sketch phase" to "nearly done." I hope to connect with more local artists too, since this has been good so far for internalizing a sense of "people seem to like me and my work, I should do something with that."
I have no plans to become an entrepreneur for this; I want to make art objects with a minimum of getting bogged down in bureaucratic backends. Maybe I'll end up working for someone else, keep an eye out if streetwear starts to feature more esoteric glyphs in the future.
