‘The apotheosis of man, the forgotten peacock’

The interdisciplinary practice-based research project, ‘The apotheosis of man, the forgotten peacock; from deconstruction to reconstruction to re-proposal of the male suit’, through a series of workshops and an interactive performance installation, aims to challenge the persisting conventional tradition of designing and wearing the male suit, proposing alternative perspectives by researcher – performance designer. The investigation focuses on the tools and means of processing the male suit in practice. It explores how to overcome conventions, generate artistic ideas, and how to apply this to something wearable. This visual essay demonstrates how the outcomes of three workshops fed on the creation of the experimental research driven suits. In all the workshops the participants were set the task to create a series of male garments by questioning and reinterpreting the notion of the masculinity and by using concepts and methods representative of deconstruction. Every participant designed and made a male garment by recycling a male suit jacket. The first presented workshop took place in May 2007, at the University of the Arts Bucharest, Romania and the participants were the second-year fashion design students. The second took place in September 2013 at the ‘World Stage Design Exhibition’, as part of the ‘Costume in Action series – Upcycling Costume: DeReconstructing Masculinity’. The participants were a mixture of student and professional international performance designers. The final two pages demonstrate the Plus Series suits, based on the addition of design elements to the suit.