FINAL MAJOR PROJECT 

CONCEPT : VAPORWAVE SUBCULTURE 

 

 

As a third year studying fashion design at Staffordshire University in my final year, I’ve had to put together a themed concept collection focusing on digital design in a subject of my choice. I chose Vaporwave Subculture as my concept. The chosen fashion area for this module was digital design. I have chosen to go along with this particular area because it is where my main skills and strength lie.

Vaporwave Subculture originates from Japan and Japanese fashion. It is a retro-futuristic subculture that waxes nostalgic for the 1990’s while mocking smooth jazz elevator music. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, elevator, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980’s and 1990’s.Vaporwave is mostly inspired by the streets of Tokyo, Seapunk, and all things vintage in the 90’s. Its made up of glitch art graphics with a huge nostalgia point as it goes hand in with a surreal design aspect, blending them into creative pink and blue neon electric artwork.

 

 

 

 

 

I had chosen this specific topic because it gives off the feeling the decades gave us from Zapp & Roger and Kenny G in the 80’s to Bell Biv Devoe in the 90’s, the songs always had a certain type of feel and energy that we can all connect to on a personal level. A lot of the population today is massively inspired by the era and its nostalgia is still used as a reference point. I also feel like Vaporwave takes those memories and turns them into this super-emotional, slightly dystopian ‘what if?’ style of music and sets something off in us that makes us groove, dance, and relax and makes us wish we could be in that non-existent period. I aspire the history behind the chosen topic and how it all came to be and how its influencing people now.

I like Vaporwave because it takes as its basis and degraded, generic commercial art we all carry in our collective unconsciousness because of popular music which has an automatic accessibility due to its familiarity, and transforms it into deeply psychedelic, hypnotic music which I believe tends to create an atmosphere fomenting altered states of consciousness in the listener.

Primary and secondary research helped me gather ideas for the design process. I began with sampling paracord knots as they reminded me of blocky lo-fi pixel graphics, paper and fabric weaving to mimic the pixels, patch pockets in the shape of console controllers, and designing my own prints in the style of old vintage games such as Pac man and Pac man ghosts, merging them together with Gameboy consoles and console controllers to create a unique print. The print designs were designed on a Pixel Art app while allowed me to produce pixelated icons and merge them together.

The shape of jackets and trousers were inspired by primary and secondary research and my sampling process. I wanted to focus on producing garments that have been heavily inspired by the concept. Therefore, the colour palette has originated from the Cyberdog store in London which is a trance music and cyber clothing and accessory retail chain inspired by Vaporwave. Taking forward the sampling of fabric weaving I have implemented them into the bottoms of trousers and the sleeves on the jackets which give them a blocky pixel look. Using the Pixel Art app I created a patch pocket in the shape of a controller console and positioned them on the jacket sleeves and trousers legs, playing around with the scale to get the best effect.

Visiting arcades with retro gaming consoles really helped to inform my research as the 8-bit graphics on the gaming consoles are very artistically pleasing, the pixels and the lo-fi graphics are built to make you feel safe and relaxed, almost as if you’ve been teleported back to the time where live was really fun and you had nothing to worry or stress about, therefore this was a huge influence on the design process as it allowed me to collate the world of pixels and 8-bit Vaporwave style art together.

To finalise, for my FMP as a digital designer, I have created a high end 6 outfit ready to wear collection which was accompanied with a diffusion line.

        SKETCHBOOK WORK AND RESEARCH