By Rational Dress Society, April 12, 2015
Rational Dress Society’s JUMPSUIT jumps up a new Kickstarter Campaign, by Baxter Barrowcliff. Read the full text of the article here.
The Rational Dress Society, a collaborative clothing company, launched a Kickstarter campaign in February to fund the production of its Chicago-made jumpsuits to alter the way people think about fashion.
The Rational Dress Society is a collaboration between New York-based visual artist Maura Brewer and Chicago-based fashion designer Abigail Glaum-Lathbury. The duo, which borrows its name from a Victorian-era dress reform organization, premiered its JUMPSUIT, capitalizing word to brand their product, during New York Fashion Week in September 2014 by giving a lecture on the history of revolutionary dress while a model wearing their ungendered, single-item line stood on a rotating platform.
Through conversations about dress, economy and self-expression, the pair developed the idea of a jumpsuit worn for any occasion as means of clearing out consumers’ closets and preventing the purchase of clothing made under “dubious” labor practices, Brewer said.
Brewer said Rational Dress Society’s JUMPSUIT is a piece of art meant to induce a conversation, but it is also important to the creators that it is seen as a garment to be bought and worn by consumers.
“I would like to emphasize that [the] JUMPSUIT is a wearable garment that we sell,” Brewer said. “But it is also a series of ideas. JUMPSUIT is both a garment and an apparatus that produces a conversation about our relationship to dress. What JUMPSUIT primarily does is operate as a space in which you and I and other people can reimagine a different relationship to clothes and fashion inasmuch as it stands in for larger structures of commodity culture.” …