The aerial view has often been used as an inspiration by fashion designers to create three-dimentional textures and surface elaborations, graphic effects or conceptual prints.
In Maison Margiela's Artisanal S/S 20 collection there was one design inspired by this trend - a dress that seemed made with a fabric characterised by multiple images of swimming pools. The photographs were obviously taken from satellite images (did they use Google Earth to do it?) and the effect seemed very similar to the images created by Jenny Odell.
In her projects the American multi-disciplinary artist has often selected from Google Earth images of man-made architectures such as swimming pools, circular farms, salt ponds, waste water treatment plants, parking lots, silos and landfills that she proceeded to isolate, cut out and reconfigure into Photoshop.
The result is fascinating and alienating at the same time as the man-made structures look uncanny when isolated from their environments.
As Odell highlights on her site: "The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth. From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts and the scattered blue rectangles of swimming pools become like hieroglyphs that say: people were here."
The same can be said about the swimming pools on the Margiela's dress: from a distance they look like aquamarine rectangles, but, close-up, they reveal there are people enjoying themselves in their crystalline waters, so that the repetitive print on the fabric becomes the tangible proof of human existence.
Odell's project is also linked with data centers as satellite images pass through them, that's why this dress somehow has a distant connection with data centers as well.
It would be nice to know if Odell's artworks were the actual inspiration behind this Margiela dress by John Galliano. But, even if they weren't the starting point for this particular design, you can bet that, at some point in future, some other fashion designer will spot Odell's digital elaborations and start creating garments and accessories inspired by her unique collages of satellite images.
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