In previous posts we looked at the original bed dress and then pondered about bed dresses during the pandemic, but it looks like Coronavirus lockdown recently inspired also a younger generation of designers to create their own version of this design.
Among them there is also Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Santa Kupča. The young Latvian designer recently created duvet-style dresses to be worn during remote video calls in Coronavirus isolation.
The inspiration came directly from her experience of the lockdown that impacted on her final project: during Zoom conversations the graduate felt indeed trapped between the digital and the physical world. Distracted by the lights and the environment surrounding her and unable to concentrate on her lectures, Kupča developed the "Stuck-at-Home Masquerade" project.
Rather than creating a collection of bed dresses, the designer came up with three variations or "chapters", as she calls them - Hesitant to RSVP, Dolce Far Niente and Public Library.
Characterised by an A-line shape, built like ponchos and resembling duvets, the dresses - designed to guarantee comfort to the wearer and keep them cosy during video calls and conferences - were made with materials Kupča had at home during lockdown, including the stuffing of an old duvet and leftover polyester fabric.
The designs offer wearers the possibility of being part of a sort of masquerade, while they are also conceived by Kupča as a way to comment about the fact that, being confined to a limited space in lockdown, each of us blended in that same space, in an act of chameleon-like camouflage or annihilation.
Rather than a proper collection the Stuck-at-Home Masquerade is conceived as a fashion diary: the "Hesitant to RSVP" dress with matching hat features a print with the pattern of a used calendar where each of the passing days has been crossed out with a green highlighter.
The dress is a reference to the act of dressing up while counting the days for the lockdown to be over, but it also hints at messed up deadlines and changed plans caused by the lockdown and at the fact that during the lockdown each day looked exactly like the previous one, with no end in sight.
Taking the name from an Italian expression meaning "pleasant idleness", the "Dolce Far Niente" dress is a floor-length padded gown in gradient shades going from pastel yellow to pink and it is a sort of grand party dress to celebrate the act of doing nothing.
Last but not least, the "Public Library" design features prints with images of shelves lined with books, and it is directly inspired by the bookshelves backgrounds that often appear in the background during lectures or when people get interviewed on the news (shelves lined with hundreds of books that people may or may have not read...).
While these quilt-like designs dresses call to mind the various bed dresses developed from the '80s on, it is interesting to note how the original inspiration behind the bed dress, changed and transformed throughout the decades, continuing to blossom, grow and transform.
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