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NIGHT BLOOM: An 1897 Wardrobe for Wireless Life
I created a fashion collection inspired by Maurice Pillard Verneuil’s L’animal dans la décoration (1897), bringing historical animal and botanical ornament into contemporary urban life. Using a custom Recraft V4 Style built from public domain archive references, I explored three pattern treatments: large statement motifs, smaller coordinated repeats, and ornamental placement borders. The collection applies these patterns to outerwear, coordinated outfits, and accessories for wireless listening, electric commuting, and modern delivery routines. As a pattern designer, I focused on motif scale, placement, and fabric detail to give the collection a consistent identity.
Beautiful, calm art, easy on the eyes, this is what we call fashion.
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Vif-Argent — Prima Materia
An invented fashion house, cast from a 1614 silver ewer and George Barbier's fashion plates.
In 1614 Adam van Vianen hammered a single sheet of silver into an ewer so fluid that the Rijksmuseum writes, "On this ewer everything is in motion," and suggests it shows prima materia, the alchemists' first matter.
I paired it with George Barbier's fashion plates and read their palette as the four colours of the alchemical Great Work: black, white, yellow, red.
Vif-Argent ("quicksilver") is an invented 2026 maison whose first collection is one transmutation in six plates, and at every stage the silver stops being jewellery and becomes the dress.
It ends in Coniunctio, the chemical wedding: she takes the hand of her own silver statue, and the two wear the same gown.
Every image was made in Recraft with chained V4 Styles: the archive first, then each stage's best plates fed back in to keep her face and the silver.
The six plates
I. Opus — the raw matter, crowned with van Vianen's silver
II. Nigredo — a ribbon burns to niello black
III. Albedo — satin turns to quicksilver
IV. Citrinitas — a pleated fan gilds into orpiment gold
V. Rubedo — the silver, molten, worn on the body
VI. Coniunctio — she joins her own silver statue
Full studio board, every iteration → https://www.recraft.ai/project/14f20321-6799-416e-b045-7931082a7ff8
Kalighat 2026: The Machines Are the New Babus
Kalighat paintings were cheap bazaar watercolours sold in 1880s Calcutta, and they were satire: they mocked the city's new rich, dandies who aped their British masters and lounged while servants fanned them.
I trained a Recraft V4 Style on five anonymous Kalighat sheets from the Cleveland Museum of Art and Wellcome Collection, keeping the bold single outline, flat colour and empty paper ground.
Then I turned the satire on 2026: the machines are the new babus. Phones smoke hookahs on velvet chairs, robot vacuums ride in palanquins, and humans fan, carry and groom their devices. Same masters, new hardware.
Social post: https://lnkd.in/p/gXJn_FQQ
MIMESIS
What happens when fashion becomes part of a painting?
Inspired by 17th-century Dutch paintings from the Getty collection, I created a custom style in Recraft to explore the relationship between fashion, art, and visual perception.
From patterned floors to velvet curtains and spotted horses, each look blends into its surroundings, blurring the line between clothing and the world around it.
Created for the Contra × Recraft Archive Style Challenge.
