Another week has flown by – & I’ve packed a lot in. With my tailored pant & blazer toile completed & submitted for assessment, I can finally turn my full focus to my phoenix-inspired hero garment.
Over the weekend, my brother André mentored me through making a prototype of my metal bodice & wings. It was my first time cutting, heating, & shaping metal – & honestly, I loved it. There’s something primal about bending a rigid material to your will, watching it shift from cold & unyielding to fluid & expressive. The finished piece is beautiful, though far too heavy to wear. I’ll create another version using a thinner gauge metal & refine the bodice so it tapers more at the waist. Still, the prototype stands as a powerful sculptural work – one that I may use in a performance exploring the weighted burden of unresolved trauma on the recovery journey, & how suffering itself can ignite transformation.
I also spent time folding origami phoenix birds & feathers from paper, cardboard, & fabric, experimenting with pleating techniques for the skirt panels. I sketched out front, back, & side silhouettes & made a paper toile – a sort of three-dimensional sketch. The design of the skirt & chaps is still evolving, but creating a toile helps me see possibilities I can’t yet articulate in words.
This week has been physically huge. I received my retired hot air balloon from Global Ballooning – a massive, colourful beast of fabric – & spent Monday cutting it into sections. On Tuesday, I sorted the pieces by my chosen colour palette, removed ropes, & trimmed the material into manageable sizes. The next task (still in progress): washing & drying the fabric, ready to transform it into my first wearable toile.
Research-wise, I’ve been diving deeper into pleating as a cross-industry design system – & into how fashion, sculpture, & architecture intersect. My mentor, Darran Arabin-Gander, encouraged me to expand my global perspective by linking my metaphors of flight, fire, & transformation with broader movements around adaptation, resilience, & sustainability. That advice has sent me down some fascinating rabbit holes: art history’s responses to crisis, paper garment architecture, & even new approaches to aerodynamic design & migration as metaphors for creative evolution.
Because the universe loves a good synchronicity, I ended my day with an unexpected conversation. My taxi driver turned out to be a pilot, logging flight hours to qualify for commercial aviation. We spoke about flight from both literal & metaphorical angles – his grounded in physics, mine in fabric & form. It was a surprisingly satisfying moment where art, design, & lived experience intersected mid-journey.
Next week, my focus will shift almost entirely to developing the toile – refining fit, movement, & balance before translating the ideas into their final form. It’s the stage where imagination meets structure, where all those sketches, experiments, & materials finally start to speak the same language.
It feels like the phoenix is taking shape – not just in fabric & form, but in me.
Larissa Sarina BAGLIERI 