There’s the art of fashion, and then there’s fashion as art. In this issue we’re highlighting 13 Chicagoans who think about the body less as a hanger than as a springboard for personal expression, resculpting or renovating the human form with garments and accessories that for the most part definitely can’t be worn with jeans. They include sculptors, painters, an architect, and a graphic designer and range in experience from student to professional. Their inspiration comes from all over the map–ichibana, civil unrest in Haiti, tripe, Victorian girlhood–but they don’t clobber you over the head with their big ideas. Instead they speak their intentions softly, encouraging viewers (and confident dressers) to decide on meaning for themselves. LA
Penelope’s, luckymountain.com
Brogger’s first crack at the runway was at a 2003 show at Open End Gallery that riffed on the theme of “fashionism,” a nod to fascist leanings in both the Bush administration and the design world. Brogger sewed more traditional garments for the show, but displayed them with a twist: “I happened to be at that time revisiting an interest in a particular sculpture,” she says, “a 1933 official portrait of Mussolini by [Renato] Bertelli. It was his profile spun 360 degrees.” Brogger made plastic helmets of her own profile and stuck them on all her models, “so I was the dictator of my fashion,” she says. LA
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Castro’s style used to be about how big his clothes could be without falling completely off his body. “I was wearing a size 42,” says the trim designer. Then in 2001 he took a trip to Europe. “I went to Amsterdam in baggy pants and I came back in straight legs,” he says. “All my friends was like, ‘Man, is you gay?’”
He’s been designing ever since, making hand-dyed T-shirts with African mask appliques and creating cotton-candy-light tops out of raw silk chiffon. He’s currently refashioning men’s shirts into more feminine shapes, including a collection of outrageous women’s button-down shirts with huge bishop sleeves, some incorporating four fabrics in the same color, all for one client. Not long ago he had a nightmare about a cockroach, so he made a cotton dress with a tail that quietly splits open and straps that accentuate the waist, creating an insectlike silhouette–again reconfiguring something ugly into something desirable. LA
Choi, whose family moved to Chicago from Korea when she was ten (with a brief stop in Schaumburg), is currently in Antwerp, where she’s landed a six-month internship with young designer Tim Van Steenbergen. While she’s there she’s studying how a city can function as a fashion center away from the hype and glitz of Paris, New York, and Milan. “In a smaller city it’s not about where you’re at; it’s about finding an environment that you feel comfortable in,” she says. “I have no desire to be in New York. At the same time, Chicago is really lacking in resources, in fashion infrastructure and production. . . . It was important for me to be [in Antwerp] to understand how to compromise.” HK
