Dandizette, 2019, Maria Foka

liquid glass, leather, nails

Wearers: Lea Vlamos & Lele Ninja | Photographer: Alexia | Artistic Direction & Styling: Lele Ninja

The hip piece & the two chokers are part of the thesis project for my MA in Architecture, ‘The Dandizette’, with supervisor Yorgos Tzirtzilakis.

Renouncing any personal confection of uniqueness, I examine myself as a whole. As a dandizette, I use vesture as a cure in order to enjoy a new form of physicality. This project aims to repair, replenish, and enhance physical pathologies, with the assistance of prosthetic technologies, identifying the human as a chimera. A chimera’s body, that of a potential superhuman has no gender, but is not innocent – it is not born in a garden and does not seek one and only identity. It does not conform to the collective memory, it does not remember the past but is the quintessence of the future. It is a being that experiences the mythology of dependence, not from others, nor from itself, but from anything that will allow it to reach the point of complete fulfillment. The symbiosis of human and machine is a matter of survival for both of them, a whole and not united fragments. The physical realization of the machines as performative garments that render the body a malleable and ever-changing sculpture happens in accordance with my body and its needs, defining a new design praxeology. The innovation that the dandistic design provides, lies in the destruction of the shame that comes with the historical meaning of the dandy and behind the characterizations of academic canonical authoritarianism that require ecumenical assumptions and generalizations. The final project examines the performativity of dress as a sartorial sculpture occurring from its symbiosis with the body. It can, and I suggest it to be applied to multiple practices with the hopes of worming in the mentality of designers the need for careful interpretation and honest consideration of the circumstances, the peculiarities, and the needs of every venture, with the ultimate purpose of the dandizette and the mythologies of the everyday superhuman that surrounds her to slide from the realm of the imaginary to that of the real.