There is a lot of talk about digital fashion designs, but most designers out there mainly create real clothes for real people, employing (more or less) conventional materials like natural or synthetic fabrics. This doesn't apply to Seiran Tsuno, though.
Born in 1990, the Japanese designer first studied at a nursing college and worked at a psychiatric hospital for around 5 years. Being very much attracted by the creative arts she enrolled at Coconogacco, a Tokyo-based private fashion school where students are encouraged to go beyond the boundaries and come up with new techniques. Tsuno tried to find new ways to create clothes and experimented with recycled materials for a while. Then she came across a 3D pen, a rather unconventional instrument considered more a toy rather than a proper artisanal tool, and she started drawing in the air head-pieces.
Tsuno noticed that, being a manual instrument, the pen still generated the classic imperfections of hand-crafted designs while 3D printers usually create flawless but maybe cold objects, so she continued working with the pen and started overlaying one line of PLA (polylactic acid; an environmentally friendly plastic made from corn) ink onto the other, developing torso-like structures and exaggerated forms.
When she tried to take the technique further and created a top and took a picture of his father wearing it, Tsuno realised the structure looked like a drawing overimposed on the picture or like the materialisation of some kind of spiritual aura emanating from her father's body.
Combining her interest in out-of-the-body experiences, her passion for the fluorescent bright and bold colours of Ukiyo-e and posters of Japanese avant-garde theatre groups from the 1960s and '70s, Tsuno created a series of cage-like dresses that became her "Wandering Spirits" collection - conceived to wear as if they were pieces of jewellery detached from the body and almost floating around it.
Donned as if they were necklaces or body adornment pieces, these fantasically shell-like constructions evoke out-of-body experiences and the sensation of the consciouness leaving one's body.
Some silhouettes with their emphasis on the shoulders and thighs seem borrowed from the Jōmon Venus (縄文のビーナス) a clay female figurine from the Middle Jōmon period (3,000-2,000 BC; View this photo) discovered in 1986 in Chino, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf (View this photo) and of a mother goddess.
In some cases her wheelchair-bound grandmother, Tsuno's beloved muse, modelled the pieces, elevating them to the degree of wearable sculptures.
Tsnuo's pieces won her a nomination at the Trieste-based ITS competition in 2018 and one of her designs featured in the key visual for Amazon Tokyo Fashion Week (S/S 19).
Tsuno has been moving on and developing her technique further: she has created a tutu and several pairs of ballet shoes with her loyal 3D pen for an installation in the Tokyo-based store of Japanese dancewear company Chacott.
Besides, she has been busy creating the next collection that features a jacket-necklace, gloves and a multi-coloured body-moulded corset covered in lace-like floral effects reminiscent of Venetian millefiori murrine and glass beads.
Looking at Tsuno's flowers you feel like being transported in glass beads like the ones designed by Marietta Barovier, those perfectly imperfect pearls that, by magic, seem to capture and trap inside them multi-coloured shapes in constant movement.
Yet there may be more to Tsuno than just a 3D pen as the designer and nurse seems to have a mission: interested in working with schizophrenic parients, she would like to create a maison with psychiatric patients, contributing to change the perception that society may have about them. Looks like the 3D pen may be mightier than the sword.
Comments