Once upon a dream

One of humanities greatest survival skills is its ability to have hope and dreams in its darkest hours. They have the ability to picture a better future, a better life than the one they are living. It is these dreams and aspirations that makes us who we are as a person. Though society plays and important role in shaping our future and our dreams it is our dreams that allow us to escape reality and transcend societies plan for our life. Yet like all things in life dreams can be broken, they can shatter and be unfulfilled. The fluidity and pliability of dreams also allow them to be transformed and molded by external factors and become something new and beautiful or something worth killing. It is this duality and subjectivity of dreams that I wanted to capture through my thesis. The concept is based on the life cycle of a dream. A dream is almost like a living being, it has a mind of its own yet it can be influenced by society. It is a living and breathing animal, forever changing, growing and evolving into something new. And like all living animals at some point it dies, it withers away into nothing but a faint memory. Each dream is unique, there are subtle nuisances and differences between the dreams of different dreamers. And this has to do with the way the dreams were affected and in uenced by the society the dreamer grew up in, their values and beliefs. This overarching uniqueness is what separates dreams that may sound, look or feel like they are similar, but in reality they are not.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way -Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

The concept was further influenced by the above quote. It resonates with the conceptual idea that while dreams may be alike in their end goals or ideologies, each dream is unique in the way it was born and the way it will die. Each dream and each dreamer is unique, the birth of their dream is unique to themself. Thus while there is similarity in dreams there is also this uniqueness that I aim to capture through the collection. Thus each garment, while telling an overarching story also tells us an individual and unique story. The garments portray the lifecycle of a dream starting with Evolve and Erupt depicting the birth or the spark that creates the dream. Moving onto Preserve and Scarred both which tell the story of how a dream transforms and changes into something else that can be both beautiful or disgusting. Finally ending with Shatter and Combust, these two tell the story of the death of dreams. How its fragility can lead to it shattering, or at some point realizing that the dream is toxic and letting it go so that one can create a new and better dream one more beautiful and lled with even more hopes and aspirations. A truer and better dream that is. The collection creates a dream like environment where each garment tells its own story and stands by itself when looking for an explanation. There is individuality in each dress, like a dream it tells its own story of birth, transformation and death. The dream isn’t meant to make sense but show us our deepest desires and play out our most absurd fantasies.