Yijun (Vivian) Liu

Fashion Design Inspired by Nightmares

Getting to sleep at night always takes me a long time because of the supernatural scenes that come into my mind. For example, I used to think of vampires, or aliens with aircraft landing on the eart —or even that I traveled to space and joined the space army to fight against enemies. There must be something behind this—I really love to watch science fiction movies. I believed I must record these fantasy images with some styles of art. Being a person who can’t live without fashion items, I decided to design a collection by using these nightmare elements.

I want to make my design full of a sense of the future, so I think the laser fabrics which can reflect light can pop out and mimic the space. I decided to make aliens and supernatural creatures from my imagery using cotton cloth and cotton stuffing, stitching them together and putting them on the clothes. Because clothes are what people wear in daily life, I don’t want to make it too bloody or too scary. And I want to design and make some accessories, like earrings, using the same ideas, with resin materials and then color them.

I did my sketches and designs almost completely on an electronic device because there are a lot of brushes and tools to help me to make my designs look as real as possible. Creative thinking is important for art makers. I believe that not only me, but most people, have had at least once dreamed of something that would happen in science fiction movies. This was my inspiration for making these designs.

View the video of Vivian’s process.