Zixuan Wang, design process

Zixuan Wang’s graduate collection ‘The suicide boom’ is inspired by The Suicide Boom by Kenji Chiga, which is a collection of photographs and research about ‘the suicide boom’ in Japan, this book reveals the social phenomenon and pressure upon the Japanese people especially towards the youth.

In order to bring nature into my designs, I did experiment of wearable bioplastic with moss/lichen, grow chia-seeds on fabric and Eco print. Among the pre-collection developments, I came across different ways to combine plants with wearable material and fabric for some textile samples, then integrated with the silhouettes from experiment collages.

In the research images of the Aokigahara forest, I found the textures of degraded clothes very absorbing, therefore in the final collection I made various kinds of draping samples by using water-soluble fabrics for ‘melting/degradation’ experiment. The reaction of dissolvable fabric on the skin creates a special feeling and texture, I worked with a factory to create some customized Devoré to achieve a similar visual texture.

The final prints are inspired by one of the works in the Yateng’s Crinkled Fog photography collection, he captured people’s emotions and feelings of depression and define them as ‘crinkled fog’-visible but untouchable.

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