The Bone Dress, Inspired by Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis and Alexander McQueen’s Voss
This outfit was designed to look like armour made out of bones, this was in an effort to symbolise that in the play Kane presented suicide as a way of protecting herself from more pain. On the dress I put a rope around the neck, pills falling under the ribcage and bloody bandages around the wrists, representing some of the ways the character in 4:48 said she would take her own life. The colours black and red and the feathers were taken from McQueen’s Voss, a collection that was inspired mental illness with a runway taking place in a mental institution. This piece was made for proof of concept, with the dress at 1/3 scale but the thermoplastic sleeves at full scale to to prove the articulated fingers would function. Photographs of the dress and the sleeves were combined using photoshop to show what they would look like if at full scale.
