In yesterday's post we looked at a painting characterized by a fragmented style, with figures and objects splintered and shattered into geometrical elements to create a visual representation of dynamic forces. Let's continue the thread, but move onto fashion with a design by Patrick Kelly.
The late African American designer had a penchant for buttons, a passion that harked back to his childhood when his beloved grandmother, Ethel Rainey, often used mismatched buttons to mend his shirts. After he complained, she started using the buttons also in a decorative way, and he continued to do so in his designs with extraordinary results.
In the case of the pinstripe denim pantsuit featured in this post – from the archives of the Goldstein Museum of Design (GMD) – the designer used red, white, and yellow dice-shaped buttons (the dice motif was also replicated in the lining with oversized red dice printed inside the jacket and black dice inside the pockets) as decorative elements on the single-breated, collarless jacket.
The pinstripe suit and the dice are references to the gambling culture from the '40s, but there is an element of fragmented chaos in the asymmetrical pockets decorated with the dice and in the faux flaps on each sleeve. There is balance in the pinstripes on each pocket that cleverly match the dice colours, but the pockets are placed diagonally on the jacket to create a striking contrast, break the linearity of the pinstripes and hint at chance and at the gesture of throwing the dice.
Kelly usually injected in his fun yet wearable designs a healthy dose of humour with a kitsch twist, subverting in this way fashion. In the case of this pantsuit he also seemed to remind us we should embrace chance, chaos and the unexpected, the perfect message to give us the strength to start the new year.
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