3 Words

For my three words project I chose Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of the book Prozac Nation as my 'muse'. Prozac Nation is an autobiography about Wurtuzel's struggles with depression and anxiety in her teens and early twenties, during the late 80's and early 90's when Prozac was just being introduced as an antidepressant. I found the book very inspiring as despite her struggles, Wurtzel still manged to complete her English degree at Harvard University and become an accomplished writer.

I have also struggled a lot emotionally during my adolescence and coincidentally just before this project started, I was prescribed Prozac. At the time, I felt like I could really relate to this book and it provided reassurance that I wasn't the only person who struggled with their emotions in this way.

I also watched the film adaption of the book Prozac Nation (2001) which starred Christina Ricci as Wurtel. I paid attention to the type of clothing that Wurtzel wore in the film, she seemed to have quite a dark, gothic, grungy style and mostly wore baggy, jumpers, jeans and black turtle necks, as if she wanted to hide her body from the world, so I decided to use this as a concept.

The other two words I chose were 'drape'; which I thought would work well with the grungy style, and 'miss-match' which relates to the confused state of mind and emotional highs and lows which Wurtzel experienced.

As a starting point I produced mood boards, these are some of them:

As a next step, I developed some basic structures on the stand, using my 3 words as initial inspiration, I also made quick sketches as I went along to record the shapes and silhouettes to use as the basis for designs.

“The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realises after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.” 

This quote from the book inspired me to base my designs on a black turtle neck. Wurtzel also repeatedly describes depression as "dark black wave" therefore I used lots of draped folds to black fabric in my designs to symbolise this.

I found an pattern made up of grey smiley faces, and decided to print this onto fabric and incorporate into designs. I thought the concept of grey smiley faces work really well with my theme, as smiley faces are a symbol of happiness and grey is a very depressing colour, which represents faking happiness, putting on a brave face and the effoects of Prozac as a 'fake' happiness. The smiley face is also a symbol of Acid House drug culture, which fits in with themes of heavy partying and drug use the book. 

I decided that I was defiantly going to base my design on a black turtleneck jumper, so I bought one from a charity shop, as unfortunately I didn't have time to knit my own. I decided to use black velvet, black cotton jersey, my smiley face print and tartan (Wurtzel wore a lot of tartan in the film and it fits into the era of 90's grunge) as my fabrics. With these I did lots of stand experimentation and sketches. 

As I was short of time, and my sewing/pattern cutting skills are not very advanced, I decided to create  a dress which was a rough impression of one of my designs.