Personal Panel Uniforms

After the first four years of making and wearing personal uniforms, Zitel began to find it more and more difficult to come up with a new style of dress each season. In response she decided to come up with a set of guidelines for her designs. Looking at the myriad of rules and dictates attached to fashion, she was particularly inspired by the Russian Constructivists. Their idiom that “geometric patterns maintained the integrity of the fabric (which was woven in rectangles)” was arbitrary in one way, lucid and sensible in another. As a way to push this rule to its absurd yet logical conclusion, she decided to take the position that all dresses should only be made from rectangles…almost as if the fabric had been sliced from the bolt. The creative variations within this format become almost limitless - it was possible to achieve the effect of either a prom dress or a blacksmith’s apron, with a few suggestive details.