Above the fold
Fine arts professor Elizabeth Mackie asks students to create wearable books. The results: Fashion fit for the style pages.
TCNJ student Briana Titus with her "Wearable Book", a collar, constructed from the pages of a book.
Fine arts professor Elizabeth Mackie asks students to create wearable books. The results: Fashion fit for the style pages.
Inspired by monks who would wear Bibles around their necks, Elizabeth Mackie has long been interested in the idea of wearable art, particularly books. “Books are precious,” she says. “Something you keep close.”
Mackie made her own first attempt at a wearable book more than a decade ago when she printed words and definitions on fabric and stitched it together to form a neckpiece (left). “It was a dictionary of all the negative terminology that refers to women,” she says.
When she started teaching a Book Arts class to art and art education majors, Mackie assigned the project as a way for students to relate to a book in a different way. “We do a lot of folding at first, and looking at structures,” she says. “But the wearable books lead students to be creative with their process and get used to handling paper and what paper can do.”
Here, her students turn heads (and pages) as they get a Vogue moment to share their fashionable fiction.
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- Art education major Brianna Titus ’23 models professor Elizabeth Mackie’s feminist dictionary.
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- Artist: Brianna Titus ’23 “I kept gravitating toward making a skirt because I was interested in how the paper would move with my body. I found a book in the free section of the library called Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, which I felt correlated well with the idea of making a feminine piece of clothing. I sewed the folded book pages together with thread.”
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- Artist: Skyler Bancroft ’23 “A map fold and the way it could curve to form a circle inspired me to create a hat similar to the crazy cool ones you see at the Kentucky Derby. I used a book from my childhood about unicorns, and folded some of the more colorful pages into origami butterflies.”
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- Artist: Lily Santo ’23 “I strapped an accordion fold book to my stomach, so that when it was opened it looked as if my guts were spilling from the book. I took specific time and effort to make the guts look anatomically accurate when the book is worn.”
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- Artist: Nikolette Sciancalepore ’22 “My piece is titled ‘Bloom,’ and gives the effect of a blossoming flower. It brings attention to human development and reflects how I’ve grown as a person. I used the summer reading book from my freshman year at TCNJ. Now I am a senior, so this particular book felt very meaningful to me while also strengthening my concept.”
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- Artist: Carly McKenzie ’22 “My grandfather owned a baggage store so handbags are sentimental to my family. I made a purse that opened like a book and inside there are several pages illustrated with the bags my mom had during my childhood. One of her bags was made of ostrich skin, so I also embossed the paper to give that texture and look.”
Picture: Peter Murphy
Posted on February 7, 2022
