Layering Art & Fashion was a collaborative exhibition and runway produced by Remie Cibis and Fiz Eustance for Melbourne Spring Fashion Week 2024. The project was developed as part of the MFSW Fashion Capsule Series curated by Rosanna Li and Marissa Wood for Emporium Melbourne.
Visitors to the exhibition were invited to browse and try-on Eustance’s paper mache sculptures and Cibis’ wearable images in a mock-retail set up housed inside a popular city shopping mall. After layering together their chosen pieces to create a look, they were then invited to have their photo taken and to participate in a runway procession throughout the complex.
Photographed by Ellie Wang and Moth Design.
Retail fit out by Moth Design.
Top worn underneath nylon skirt. Backless shoes with ankle ties from a selection. Agate and diamond pendant necklace. Pants sold as set with jacket. White-gold, diamond and topaz rings. Cropped cardigan. Belted shorts. Chocolate embossed leather. Satin bra. Bow worn as necktie. Cotton-mix shorts. Pool slides. Viscose jacket. Silk shirt. Jogging bottoms.
'Ready-to-Wear,’ offered a selective edit of the season’s most fashionable looks, as wearable images. Assembled from the pages of Vogue and printed on chartreuse-backed, silk-satin, these glamorous visions were arranged, styled and worn, by participants in exchange for a photograph of their newly assembled look.
This event took place on Thursday March 3rd 2022, as part of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, at KINGS Artist Run.
Photography by Agnieszka Chabros and Sanja Pahoki. Sound & Lighting by Dave Franzke.
Special thanks to everyone who participated and to the volunteer team including: Gabrielle Sharkey, Shae Guttler and Tayla Gauci. Thanks also to KINGS - and especially to KINGS gallery manager Katie Ryan - for all of your help and support.
Advertisements from fashion magazines redacted with black permanent marker.
Collaged Clothes was an interactive workshop held as part of the Everything & Everybody as Material: Dialogical Bodies, Artistic Research Exchange at the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås, Sweden in April of 2024. The workshop explored how everyday people can reimagine mass-produced garments using collage. Participants in the workshop were offered a range of second-hand garments and current fashion magazine photographs (that had been printed onto length of fusible fabric) to work with. By collaging the photographs onto the garments, they explored the use of collage as both an image-making and garment-making method and devise a range of personalised fashion-images using these materials.
Photographed by Andrés Rehbein and Vanessa Duque.
Special thanks to everyone who participated in the workshop including Anna Lidström, Melanie Bower, Ingvild Rømo Grand, Santiago Útima Loaiza, Chinouk de Miranda, Collette Paterson and a participant who has chosen to remain unnamed.
She is in it not not at all, was presented as part of the VAMFF 2019 Arts Program and the Kings Artist Run, FLASHnight Series. The performance presented a series of garments designed from images and as images. Clothes flattened and compressed against the body, or else distorted and deformed by it. Playing upon the traditional form of a fashion runway within the context of an art gallery; the models first presented the garments worn upon their bodies, before working with an installation technician to hang them on the gallery walls.
Photography by Kristin Wursthorn. Garments modelled by Kathryn Jones and Ruth Hazel. Installation by Kel Glaister. Hair and make-up by Xeneb Allen, Gemma Victoria, Dani Fischer and Deb Fabris. Music and Sound by Sanja Pahoki. Backstage and Dressing by Sean Rentero and Paige Costa. Special thanks also to Nyssa Marrow, George Chan, Blake Barnes, Konrad Cibis, Maree Cibis, Ricarda Bigolin and Sean Ryan.
Less is More. More or Less. was a fashion performance that sought to produce a series of looks by using strategies of deletion and negation. As more and more of the body was redacted, a space was opened up and a series of garments began to emerge in its place.
This event took place on Friday March 13th 2020, as part of the VAMFF Arts Program, at Sarah Scout Presents and features paintings by Greg Creek.
Photography by Agnieszka Chabros. Modelling by Oliver Layton, Kathryn Jones and an unnamed model. Hair & Make-Up by Meggie M. Music and Sound by Sanja Pahoki. Featuring artwork by Greg Creek and Kate Daw.
Special thanks to Ricarda Bigolin, Sean Ryan, Sean Rentero and Carys Norwood.
The Ideal Tee is a series of virtual t-shirts, featuring flat-lay photography by Kristin Wursthorn, of garments made by Remie Cibis for the Performance ‘She is in it not not at all.’ These images were shown in an online exhibition as part of the Eleventh Annual Conference on the Image 2020.
This outfit was developed in collaboration with musician Sui Zhen and artist Sanja Pahoki for an isolated experimental DJ set within the entrance of CCP, as part of the 2021 ‘To Resound, Unbound’ exhibition. Closed behind locked glass doors, with only the light of Pahoki’s installation illuminating the performance, the event explored sound and its engagement with space, surfaces and situations.
Photography by Lucy Foster.
The Fashion Edit was a workshop, held as part of the 2019 AAANZ Conference at the University of Auckland, that questioned how fashion functions representationally in terms of images and sought to offer wearers an opportunity to visually edit a commercial fashion garment. This was done by applying a black, iron-on patch to redact an unwanted aspect from a piece of clothing, the results of which were documented photographically and with swing tag statements.
All garments generously donated by Savers Recycle Super Store Moorabbin. Special thanks also to Monica Wang, Tessa Cammell, Linda Tyler, Ricarda Bigolin, Sean Ryan and everyone who took part in the workshop.
Photography by Kiron Robinson
The Seam, Seam Garments explores how seaming practices, such as exposing, exaggerating, multiplying, highlighting, reducing, removing, eliminating, and depicting, can articulate the semiotic relationship - and the space that exists - between, the garment and the body. By exaggerating seam allowances, inserting enlarged faggoting stitches, drafting single piece patterns and placing digitally printed seams these garments disrupt traditional approaches to constructing garments and in turn the body.
During the Seam, Seam Fitting Sessions visitors were invited to try on the Seam, Seam Garments in the bedroom of a private apartment, as they might do when dressing for the day in their own home.
Photography of installation and garments by Christian Capurro. Photography of fitting session by Yvette King, featuring Kel Glaister.
Presented as part of LMFF 2010, Cut + Sew explored the apparent contradictory definition of the seam as both join and fissure. All garments in the collection were constructed by either cutting and not sewing or sewing and not cutting. As a result, large whip stitches and ties were instead used to form the garments and to mark out traditional sites of seaming.
Runway Photography by Lucas Dawson and Kelly Defina.
Fashion Shoot Photograohy by Amy Marjoram. Garments modelled by Kristin Wursthorn, Hannah Camilleri and Amy Alexander.
Deletion Dressing was an at home workshop conducted in 2021, during Covid-19 Lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia. The project explores how wears may intervene and re-imagine the prefabricated images produced by the fashion industry using stratagies of deletion, editing, arrangement and dressing.
Participants were asked to accept a delivery of black cotton rectangles that could be strapped, draped, or tied to the body. Using these rectangles, they were then asked to style a new “look” over the top of the outfit they were wearing on the day, and to share a photograph of the result.
Special thanks to all of the participants for their unique, individual responses and photographic documentation of their “looks.”
Seam, Seam but Different was presented at Neapoli Wine Bar as part of the Neapoli Art Bar Program, curated by Nik Pantazopoulos. Two models wearing the Seam, Seam Garments, wandered slowly amongst the bar patrons, exchanging looks and looking back. Looping through the space and into the 'birdcage,' the models presented themselves, and the garments, for observation as they rotated slowly like dolls inside a music box.
Photography by Kristin Wursthorn. Shoes by Claire Best. Garments modelled by Bridget Petry and Anna Petry. Hair by Saint Louie Hair. Make-up by Rob Povey. Rotating Platform by Yvette King and Kel Glaister. Sound by Sanja Pahoki. Special thanks to Nyssa Marrow, Nik Pantazopoulos, Lily Lapper and Otto Ivor Enos.
The Seam, Seam Runway was presented during VAMFF 2017. This showing of the Seam, Seam Garments utilised the first floor corridor of a domestic apartment block as a runway and performance space. Drawing on the everyday qualities and uses of the corridor, models entered and exited through the six apartment doors, create a loose narrative of comings and goings.
Photography by Kristin Wursthorn. Details taken from video footage recorded by Aly Peel. Garments modelled by Danielle Abery, Bianca Boyd, Cici Chen, Ebony Tiffin and Milda Vidugiryte. Hair and make-up by Xeneb Allen. Lighting by Evan Drill.
T-shirt made from cotton jersey and transfer prints of desktop icons.
Remie Cibis 2019
In 2020, during the covid-19 lockdowns, Agnieszka Chabros and I worked together to produce this collaborative collection for her label Matt Finish. Matt Finish explores reuse through collaborative garment editions and the application of fashion-images to clothes as a means of enhancing their perceived value. This particular collection considered the similarities between garments and photographs as representational forms, whilst also seeking to uncover the gaps and slippages that exist between material and visual modes of image-making.
Photographed by Agnieszka Chabros.
Garments by Agnieszka Chabros & Remie Cibis.
A series of easy smart-professional looks for to wear for your online meeting, whether in lock-down or just working from home.
Remie Cibis 2020
Elk x Remie Cibis was a collaborative project developed by ELK’s Head of Creative: Amadio Collafella, Co-Founder: Marnie Goding and myself to celebrate 20 years of the iconic Melbourne label Elk. For the project we reimagined three existing Elk looks through a collagic up-cycling process that brought together deconstructive and reconstructive methods from my PhD research and Elk’s commitment to sustainable fashion design.
The project was shown as part of the M/FW CLOSING SHOWCASE: Celebrating 30 years of M/FW in October of 2024.
Photographs and graphics by Elk.
