Renouncing any personal confection of uniqueness, I examine myself as a whole. As a dandizette, I use vesture as a cure to enjoy a new form of physicality. This project aims to repair, replenish, and enhance physical pathologies through prosthetic technologies, identifying the human body as a chimera. A chimera’s body—that of a potential superhuman—has no gender, yet it is not innocent; it is not born in a garden nor does it seek a singular identity. It does not conform to the collective memory, nor does it dwell on the past, but it is the quintessence of the future. It is a being experiencing the mythology of dependence—not on others, nor on itself, but on anything that will allow it to achieve complete fulfillment.
Here, the symbiosis of human and machine is a matter of mutual survival: a cohesive whole, rather than fragmented parts. The physical realization of these machines as performative garments—rendering the body a malleable and ever-changing sculpture—occurs in direct accordance with my body and its needs, defining a new design praxeology. The innovation of this dandistic design lies in dismantling the historical shame of the dandy and rejecting the canonical authoritarianism that demands universal assumptions and generalizations.
Ultimately, this work examines the performativity of dress as a sartorial sculpture emerging from its symbiosis with the body. It proposes a shift in design mentality toward a rigorous, honest consideration of unique circumstances and needs, enabling the dandizette and the everyday superhumans around her to slide from the realm of the imaginary into the real.
The hip piece and the two chokers are part of the thesis project for my MA in Architecture, ‘The Dandizette’.
