Denver Art Museum's Fashion Studio

Stocked with fabrics, dress forms, mini design mannequins, magazines for inspiration collages, scissors, light-tables, coloring tools, (and for aspiring models: clothing, hats, a runway, and large mirrors), the Denver Art Museum Fashion Studio is a great playground for people interested in the creation of fashion and its presentation.

Even though my Colorado visit just barely missed Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective exhibit, DAM's Fashion Workshop helped bridge the gap. 

After spying the art supplies and magazines (and large, inviting, manila cardstock), I was anxious to return to the fashion space... though my thorough museum visits are notoriously excruciating to family members.  This museum visit was doubly pleasurable in that it offered the opportunity to create - within the stimulating museum environment.

Toile La La fantasy collage created in Denver Art Museum Fashion Studio. 

For some time now, my imagination has been consumed primarily by thoughts of hats - so this was an opportunity to have fun with some outlandish millinery designs.  Tearing through the provided architectural, fashion, home design, and interview magazines - I gathered a nice stack of images.

What you see above are (clockwise from the seated model with the rose hat): an idea for a "real, live, gigantic rose chapeau", a papier mache sculpture hat... composed of smiling Buddha faces, a rooster wig (that looks like a rooster... not FOR a rooster), a bright geranium red cardboard house bonnet - that ties under the chin, a "garden jumper" that grows real foliage (those are Kesha's feet wearing Y-3 socks and Kenzo shoes - which appeared in Interview magazine), an illuminating lamp hat, a "wacky" skirt, and a mannequin-look dress (with a nod to the Martin Margiela Semi-Couture collection).

There wasn't time to note all the collage sources - such as the graphic artist who created the great image I used for the "wacky skirt", but if you see an image you recognize - please leave a comment to enable me to give attribution to the artists and designers who inspired this collage.

Not only did the museum provide this great fashion workspace, it has also hosted fashion demonstration workshops in fashion illustration, styling, design and construction, upcycling, draping and patternmaking, and fashion design with Adobe Illustrator. There is still an upcoming Adobe illustration tutorial August 19 and later - a fashion illustration demonstration August 25 and 26 and September 1 and 2.

Thank you, Denver Art Museum.

• If you liked the collage, some of my older ones (incorporating watercolor) are at this link.
• There are also some collage-type paper dolls here.