Fi Grew makes fashion without clothes

“It’s important to follow instincts and intuition.”

During her time at the RCA, Grew interpreted the aesthetic experience of fashion through photography, collage, sculpture, and installation instead of the typical faculties of fashion design. For some projects this meant throwing out the brief and making what felt appropriate and authentic. “It’s important to follow instincts and intuition,” she believes. Grew sees her work being experienced more so than worn – a condition of “being in rather than dressed by,” she explains. Eschewing the conventional structure of a collection, her final project consists of a rich volume of studies around the body, space, light, and shadow which collectively work towards a proposed installation.

Her research process commenced with many series of luminous black-and-white photography. For example, she recorded her shadow in a collection of photos taken of the ground. Dappled with soft textures, the series documents a gently varying series of gestures and poses. Whether stretching her legs into spindly twigs or blurring together her torso and handbag into a bulbous blob, the position of the sun has just as much control over the presentation of her body as she does. It was an intuitive way to start developing forms. Taken from direct observation, these images felt human, immediate, and in-the-moment to her. “They were quite figurative,” she says. “They were shapes that really existed.”

She collaged the photographs together, slicing them along sensuous curves and overlaying them with images of draped fabric. She also printed out her photographs at human-scale and affixed them to cardboard, building up three-dimensional sculptures. She took inspiration here from the likes of Alexander Archipenko, David Hockney, and Jean Arp. In the legacy of Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse, she draped fabric into seductive folds and twists, photographing and collaging it into her shadow studies.

Since Grew sought to make sculptural evocations of clothing rather than actual garments, these studies weren’t toiles or sketches so much as sculptures in progress intended for a viewer, not a wearer. “I wanted the work to stand alone and have a strong identity,” she says – an identity independent of a model’s body. But she worried that this would leave her work too stationary. “Movement was something I struggled with because the objects I was creating were static,” she says. “As soon as you put another person in with the work the identity changes. So I brought light into the space instead.” She would photograph her work in progress in the school studios for a couple hours each day by a window with good lighting. The sunlight would cast shifting shadows on and from her sculptures in progress, reinvigorating them and generating new ideas. “It brought life into something that would have just been still life.”

The cycle of photographing, printing, sculpting, and photographing again worked much like a chain reaction, every moment anticipating and catalyzing new ideas for the next. But the pandemic drew the process to a halt as she could no longer access the studio space sufficient for her full-scale development. Confined to working in her flat, she adjusted by planning her installations in miniature dioramas that model the art gallery, inspired formally by 18th-century paper peep shows. These studies take skillful advantage of their papery format. For example, one imagines two full-scale photographs placed on the floor with silhouetted cut-outs raised in perpendicular, an effect that would have been much more difficult to achieve in full-scale.

“You need to ask yourself what you mean by ‘fashion.’”

The uncompromising formalism and non-clothing format of her work invites some existential questions on the limits of what qualifies as fashion. Grew distances herself from any generalizations, encouraging all young designers to self-reflect. “You need to ask yourself what you mean by ‘fashion,’” she says. For her it simply means “to make forms for the body.” By making corporeal forms instead of clothes, Grew escapes the commercializing and commoditizing logics of the fashion industry, prioritizing the experience of making over final products. “I’ve always enjoyed making and building. It just feels natural.” Remaining grounded in the making process without fixating on outcomes, Grew keeps her work malleable, always in flux, never as static as her photographic source material.

“I’m proud that I managed to accomplish everything from my desk.”

While deeply committed to staying present in the here and now, Grew’s graduate project is nonetheless immured in an uncertain future tense, laying plans for installations and environments that she cannot fully realize under the conditions of the pandemic. Still, she is content for now with the small-scale plans. “I’m proud that I managed to accomplish everything from my desk.”