That designer is a…worm |

When I usually get bored or pissed off about something, I usually take refuge in experimenting with different materials, trying to come up with ideas for my own accessories and things like that.

In the last few days too many people and things annoyed me, so I have been following a different personal project to distract myself, developing an idea for a digital print.

I have always been fascinated by the transformations some materials can go through, and I found absolutely intriguing designs such as those ones created by Hussein Chalayan for his "The Tangent Flows" collection or by Martin Margiela for his 1997 exhibition at the Rotterdam-based Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Chalayan buried fabric with iron filings in a garden and dug it up six weeks later to see how the rusted iron had stained the fabric, while Margiela studied the processes of decay by saturating his designs with a growing medium called agar, spraying them with green mould, pink yeast and bacteria and then leaving the moulds and bacteria growing on the clothes.

In both the cases new clothes were transformed into old clothes, but in the latter the moulds and bacteria almost collaborated to the design project creating special patterns on the fabric.

My original idea was developing digital prints with rotten fruit, but a rather clever worm disrupted my plan, showing it had more fashion sense than me.

The worm living inside my yellow apple hasn’t simply dug up a hole in the fruit in the style of the more famous “Very Hungry Caterpillar”, but it has been tracing quite an interesting path under the skin of the apple, leaving a brown trail behind it.

When you digitally retouch photographs and images of the apple by blowing them up and blurring them, the worm’s tunnels look like batik-style prints.

I guess that the idea of having a garment with a print made by a worm could have a metaphorical meaning: worms help with the process of decomposition, but by wearing a dress with a worm-made print it would be a little bit like having a worm digging out tunnels under your skin while you're still alive or it could be seen as a reference to the rotten corpse of global fashion capitalism.

Besides, in a world that tries to constantly make new things look extremely old and worn out by aging them, adding a patina of decay via a print genuinely made by a worm would probably be refreshing.

While I'm thinking about further metaphors between the decay/decomposition themes and worm prints, my designer worm has silently kept on digging its way through the apple and freaking out random family members and visitors who are encouraging me to throw the apple away to avoid the worm escaping from it and making its way through more fruit or plants lying around the house.

For the time being, though, I think I'll continue my experiment: I just want to see what my very hungry designer worm will do if it's left to its own devices for a few more days.