Combining her passion for social issues as inspiration for her work, MA Costume Design for Performance student Jessica, has already started to make her mark on the industry. During her time at London College of Fashion, we have seen her win the prestigious Procter and Gamble award, as well as secure a World of Wearable Art award nomination.
MA Costume Design for Performance can be found in our School of Media and Communication and is an exciting course designed for students with a passion for costume design in the contexts of literature, fine art, film and design.
Costume design is a versatile form of art, which is not just about clothing, but requires an understanding of the psychology and history that inspire each creation.
Offering the perfect blend between theory and practice, our students explore the discipline through specialised design realisation, conceptual development and theoretical and practical based research methods. The course aims to nurture the next generation of talent, who can break new ground in costume design for live, film and digital performances.
Our international reputation allows us to welcome students from all over the world. For example, prior to joining LCF, Jessica spent much of her adult life in Oregon (USA), where her design career first began. It was here where she studied Apparel Design, before pivoting her career to Corporate Sustainability, which was more in line with her passion for collaborative and systemic change at brand and industry level.
Her passion to explore ecological and social issues, while also feeding her creative appetite, led her to MA Costume Design for Performance here at LCF. As a student on the course Jessica has excelled as shown by her Procter and Gamble award, which she received as a result of her work produced on the ‘Narrative Costume and Performance’ module.
We caught up with Jessica, to find out more about the Narrative Costume and Performance unit, her inspirations, awards and more!
What made you choose to study MA Costume Design for Performance at London College of Fashion?
The course stood out to me because it directly challenges the traditional beliefs around costume being a tool to help tell someone else’s story. Instead, it offers an experimental approach that recognises costume as a vehicle to tell your own story.
This felt aligned with how I have always viewed costume, seeing it as medium that can help us immediately transform and embody new realities of our own imagination. When I read that the course equally supported students in developing a concept and narrative alongside the skills for designing and making, I knew it was worth the move to the UK!
Can you tell us about the module which led to you producing the work which was selected for the World of Wearable Art competition?
Our first term was ‘Narrative Costume and Performance’ and focused on the story of Rusalka, exploring its folktale symbolism and societal themes relevant to contemporary times. We underwent personal investigations of this story, yet all centered our design around engagement with live performance and, to quote our brief, “transforming bodies in movement, staged worlds, and performance time and space”.
Can you tell us a bit more about this competition and what inspired the costume you designed?
WOW (World of Wearable Art) is an international competition based in New Zealand that invites designers from all over the world to submit their costumes, showcasing 120 finalists in a large theatrical performance every fall. I honestly didn’t expect to get through the two selection rounds and into the finals so, I’d encourage anyone who has a creative, conceptual costume to apply!
As for the concept and interpretation that my costume is based on, I focused on the parallels between the worlds in Rusalka and the very real-life tragedy of waste colonisation today – in particular the overproduction & overconsumption of fast fashion from rich, former colonial powers like Western Europe that create serious consequences in second-hand clothing markets and their communities like in Accra, Ghana’s Kantamanto Market.
The costume I made was for the Prince character, who I viewed as a mountain of greed, exploitation & anthropocentrism. To make the costume, I manipulated approx. 35kg of secondhand clothing donated by one of the UK’s largest clothing reprocessing plants, Chris Carey Collections. Overall, the costume conveys human consumption compressed into geological time and the human myth that we’re separate from nature, which I believe underpins the creation of waste and its denial.
What skills would you say you have gained because of being on MA Costume Design for Performance?
First and foremost, I’d say confidence in the creative process. Each term we move through stages of design, from visual concepting and sketching to initial costume maquettes and toiles, all which break down the costume design process into actionable steps. This has served as a helpful anchor that I trust I’ll continue to apply to any project in the future.
Alongside this, I’d say I gained a lot of technical skills in draping, pattern making, construction, as well as sculpting and manipulating materials (small plug to say a BIG thanks to all the skills support from our lab technicians!).
Each costume that you design gives you the chance to explore new skills and methods in construction, so I’d say it’s an important opportunity to challenge yourself and pursue the areas you want to grow in.
You were also awarded the Procter and Gamble Better Lives Award for your Master’s Project, are you able to tell us a bit more about this project and what winning this award means to you?
My final Master’s Project will investigate costume as a speculative tool for interspecies communication – in particular, between plants and humans. I’ve been reading a lot about emerging plant behavior research and been amazed by the hidden intelligence we tend to easily overlook around us.
For this final project, I’ll explore the biosemiotics of intrinsic plant languages (i.e., biochemical) and how these can be expressed corporeally to expand human perception – all in service of helping foster human-planetary coevolutionary capacities. My final output will be a costume that conveys this communicative exchange and speculates on its future function to enable better observation, better reciprocity, and overall better lives across a non-human centric society.
Receiving the Procter and Gamble Better Lives Award has meant a great deal to me. Beyond the funding aspect, which will greatly expand my practice-based research and sourcing of sustainable materials, it has given me validation and confidence in undergoing this kind of unlikely interdisciplinary pursuit. Most notably, I’ve gotten to engage with two research scientists and have been greatly inspired by the creative community they’ve shared with me, alongside their knowledge of weaving art and design with science and innovation, the direction I’d like to purse after graduating this December.
Interested in seeing more of Jessica’s work? Visit her website www.voncurry.com.