Local Designer
The NuBe Green designer makes insects out of human hair. Yeah. Insects, human hair.
Posted by: Laura Cassidy on Nov 18, 2011 at 07:00AM
SLIDESHOW: Fashion designer Adrienne Antonson told me recently of her hair insects, “They’re so different from my clothing, but they also relate in many ways.” I had to find out what she meant.
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Photo:
All images courtesy the artist
SLIDESHOW: Fashion designer Adrienne Antonson told me recently of her hair insects, “They’re so different from my clothing, but they also relate in many ways.” I had to find out what she meant.
View Slideshow »
Illustration:
“No matter the form I’m working in,” says Antonson, the designer of State, NuBe Green’s newly renamed and relaunched line of remade vintage clothing, “my material choices share many common threads. I am attracted to cast-offs, underdogs, and undervalued items. To revive a material into something new and unexpected is thrilling to me and is the main motivation of my work.”
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Illustration:
I don’t mind insects at all, but I’m guilty of not always seeing the beauty that Antonson sees when she looks at the bug world. With pieces like this, however, I come around to her point of view.
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Illustration:
“My end products are quite different—a summer dress, or a stick Insect—the inspiration, process, and goals are the same,” reports the artist. “Both acts are meticulous and result in detailed pieces that encourage consideration of the materials. I enjoy balancing these different creative modes and find that taking a break from fashion to study moth evolution only inspires the next season’s collection.”
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Illustration:
Antonson isn’t an undiscovered hair bug artist, that’s for sure. A wide and globe-spanning variety of media sources has picked up on her work, and pretty much everyone takes the opportunity to use two or more bad puns. (Check out this example from the Huffington Post, who can sort of always be relied upon for bad puns.)
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Illustration:
You hear a lot about sustainable materials these days—typically bamboo, cork, recycled rubber. What about hair though? Hair? Yeah, hair.
Along with salvaged worn-in silk, soft thrift store denim, and vintage cashmere wool, it’s a favored medium of Adrienne Antonson, the until-just-recently Vashon-based artist and designer known for her collection of vaguely 80s Japanese-feeling repurposed and rebuilt clothing at NuBe Green. She uses it (the hair) to craft—get this—highly accurate models of bugs.
Of course, working with hair isn’t new. Many an upright and proper Victorian lady crocheted it into mourning jewelry; they wove it into bracelets and coiled it under glass.
But Antonson has always liked bugs, see. They’re tiny and miraculous and curious, so she collects hair (her own, that of friends and maybe family) and meticulously winds, shapes, twists, and otherwise coaxes it into spot-on replicas of her favorite insects.
Recently, Ripley’s Believe It or Not bought up her collection. Hair being about as replenishable as any resource you can imagine (which is totally the point), she made more.
(And yeah, believe it or not, Ripley’s is still around, and apparently buying stuff from artists.)
Check out the slideshow here to see some of Antonson’s recent work and learn how she relates silk shirts to silkworms and so forth.
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