In yesterday's post we looked at polka dots, one of Comme des Garçons signature patterns, appearing on the Parisian menswear runway of the famous Japanese house. There was a time when in Glasgow polka dots became rather fashionable, thanks to a punk/new wave band that favoured this print and pattern in their costumes and that successfully managed to export their Scottish "Gothic Lolita" look to Japan in the early '80s.
I'm obviously talking about the Strawberry Switchblade duo – that is Jill Bryson and Rose McDowall – who often appeared at gigs and on their record covers clad in unique polka dot dresses. Yet their journey through pollka dots started at the School of Art in Glasgow where both Bryson and McDowall studied.
Bryson was enrolled in the Mixed Media department and her first experiments in the early '80s combined performance art with fashion. She often employed second-hand designs in her works and one of her first installation/performance featured girls from her department in dark dresses on a dark background juxtaposed to a woman in a black and white polka dot dress and a parasol standing against a white background.
More experiments with patterns continued with a mesmerising installation that featured women wearing outfits in the same materials that hung behind them - polka dots, stripes and a Harlequin pattern – obviously in Bryson's favourite colours, black and white.
Another tableau vivant by Bryson consisted in a box covered in polka dots with a live figure clad in a white body suit, a frock and a mask covered in black polka dots. As the figure danced to The Velvet Underground, she revealed that underneath she was wearing black.
Bryson combined fashion, music and theatre in her performances, coming up with a very punk vision of the world. Bryson and McDowall's best years are linked to their career as the Strawberry Switchblade and to the years spent at the School of Art.
Sadly, the School of Art's Mackintosh building, partially destroyed by a fire in May 2014, was devastated by a bigger and more destructive fire on 15th June.
Designed by Art Nouveau architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who created also the iconic details that characterised its interior, from the furniture to the lamps, the building was restored and there were plans to make sure undergraduate students returned there in 2019.
The recent and more devastating fire badly damaged also the surrounding buildings and at the time of writing it is still uncertain if Mackintosh's masterpiece will be saved or be lost forever.
This very basic necklace is inspired by the main themes of this post: I made it with large wooden beads - some of them painted in black or with black stripes and polka dots to replicate the patterns used in one of Bryson's installations - as a tribute to the Strawberry Switchblade's passion for polka dots, to Bryson's pattern projects and to Glasgow's School of Art, showed in the following image with a picture and a polaroid I took exactly twenty years ago for a personal art project.
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