When film, fashion and interiors collide: Designing the After Darkly Graduate Fashion Show

In 2013 QUT Interior Design and Fashion Disciplines partnered to design the Catwalk for the QUT After Darkly Graduate Fashion Show. The ephemeral work (catwalk canopy and cinematic affects) was developed through collaboration between the authors based upon an undergraduate interior design unit ‘Filmic Interiors’ in which students were tasked with designing a fashion show. Filmic Interiors exploited the potential of film to influence, understand, and develop novel interior spaces through consideration of mise-en-scene, cinematic effects and atmospheric design strategies engaged by key film directors Jean Pierre Jeunet and Darren Aronofsky. The design outcome represents a hybridisation of student design proposals, contemplating both film and emerging collections from graduate fashion students. The work explored a number of iterations each testing material qualities and immaterial cinematic affects, as a means to develop new space. The process was led by experimentation undertaken by the designers through previous studio explorations surrounding the theme of ‘Strange Space’ and design practice ‘Making Strange’(Lindquist & Pytel, 2012). In doing so, the work paralleled the material formations of ‘obsessive collections’ and ‘making do’ evident in Jeunet’s scenography, rendering uncanny hybrid space (Ezra, 2008). Evocation of the immaterial found in much of director Aronofsky’s work, also became critical in the atmospheric experience intended for the show. This paper explores the process of collaboration and material experimentation in design, approached through a filmic lens. It provides insight into what happens when one enters into what can be termed an ‘ecology of production’, whereby the experimental making becomes the collaborative agent between designers, disciplines, and between stage and spectators. Finally it underlines the importance of ‘finding the work’ through material making and testing rather than through more controlled formalistic responses.