Cooperation, creativity and the art of building a bridge from the historical to the modern all come together for students in Christine Gallagher’s DHE 360 class, Collaborative Studio.
The course is designed to examine a variety of collaborative methodologies and situations; students work across design disciplines to complete various and complicated projects.
Exemplifying that mission is a roughly two-week undertaking that saw three- and four-person teams draw inspiration from historical textiles to create product lines based on those fabrics and what they learned about and from them; the lines had to include at least one prototype.
The vintage pieces at the core of the project are part of the School of Design and Human Environment’s Historic & Cultural Textile and Apparel Collection.
As the project description explains, the collection “was started in the 1940s through the efforts of several professors in the Department of Clothing, Textiles, and Related Arts in the School of Home Economics. The collection … consists of Euro-American apparel, non-Euro-American cultural textiles and cultural apparel but also includes fabric samples, tapestry fragments, and accessories from many cultures. While the bulk of the entire collection is from the 19th and 20th century, there is cultural wear, textiles and textile fragments from the 15th, 17th, and 18th centuries.”
Among the items the student teams used as their creative muses were a civil rank badge from China’s Ch’ing Dynasty, a navy wool bathing suit, embroidered silk, a Guatemalan huipil, a tent coat and a skirt suit. The product lines those artifacts spawned were “conceptually rich and very interesting,” Gallagher told her students following their class presentations.
Examples:
Pacific Picnic, a “modern beach experience” inspired by the wool swimsuit; products included the Nautical Napkin and the Beach Basket.
The Bodhi Meditation Line, a set of home goods designed to foster meditation, such as a specialized lamp and floor mat; the civil rank badge led to this line’s creation.
Northwest Trek, a collection of hiking accessories (boots, field journal, picnic blanket) inspired by the huipil.
Chambri, a coffee shop and related products aimed at women seeking a break from day-to-day life; the Chambri are a woman-dominated tribe in Papua New Guinea, and the company and products were inspired by the tent coat of the 1960s, a time when women were beginning to enjoy new freedoms in American society.
Gallagher teaches two sections of Collaborative Studio, and the product lines developed by both will be reviewed by jurors for an exhibit that will be presented alongside the SDHE’s annual Spring Fashion Show on May 30.
