Missing in Action
The video clip of the singer M.I.A. Born Free was removed from YouTube, the most popular video hosting. The nine-minute video for the new song Born Free talks about soldiers killing red-haired people. The executions are shown very believably. Since the release this work of the singer has constantly entered the lists of most controversial and disturbing video clips in history.
Salon called the Born Free video the most violent clip made in a long time and a true «nine-minute masterpiece», emphasizing that M.I.A. has built a career on very honest yet very danceable music and that her video is an undeniably powerful metaphor of the ethnic cleansing going on around the world. M.I.A. also spoke about the concept of the album, which includes this track: «It tells about isolation, alienation from the world, about the impossibility to leave for another place.»
Talking about the politicized work of the singer and her active position, and focusing on devices she used in the Born Free video clip, where she made the genocide of red-haired a symbol of the genocide of minorities and people from the Third World, as well as racism and civil wars, I decided that I should use the same «transfer» technique in the design.
Since the fourth module is devoted to colour, I decided to shift the semantic meanings in this direction: as in M.I.A.’s video, where red-headed people were a symbol of enmity, those one must get rid of, I attributed exactly the same meaning to the colour Living Coral, paying attention to the colour adjective. This is how the idea of a certain utopian system was born — a system where the authorities reduce all people to the common denominator, literally «washing away» the colour from them, erasing their essence.
That is why the colour interacting with the coral is gray — an achromatic colour that has no message and meaning, this is the default color, an empty filler. No one should stand out not only in terms of colour palette, but also in terms of design, therefore, the assortment contains only elements of casual clothing — office items, clerk suits, gray denim and borrowings from sportswear.
M.I.A.’s activism in the eco-environment fits perfectly into the concept — she became the first H& M ambassador for clothing recycling and shot a large-scale video clip Rewear It, as well as encouraged her fans to make merch with her trademark signs themselves in the nearest printing houses, leaking *.png files with her official emblem to the Web. Therefore, all the clothes in my collection is the result of recycling.
MERCH
COLOR EXCERCISES / FABRIC MANIPULATION
АССОРТИМЕНТ
FINAL SCETCHES
LOOKBOOK
CAMPAIGN
