A-Z Six Month Seasonal Uniforms

Zittel’s longest-running continuous artwork, the “Uniform Project” began in 1991 while the artist was working in a gallery in New York City. As she was working at an office job , Zittel was expected to wear “something respectable”to work. As a young artist, Zittel had very little money to spend on a wardrobe and decided that wearing one fabulous outfit, day after day, was the solution to her problem. While there is often a social stigma attached to wearing the same clothes two days in a row, Zittel’s response to the immediate situation was as pragmatic as it was provocative. Confronting the values placed on fashion and hygiene, Zittel’s fantasy creations are a daily experiment in living. Each handmade creation responds to a particular moment in the artist’s life – her most current interests, tastes, and thoughts. When Zittel began to run out of ideas for new outfits, she developed a set of formal parameters to work within. Interested in the geometric clothing made by Russian Constructivists at the turn of the century, Zittel determined that every article of clothing would be modeled after a rectangle – the original shape of the fabric. Reveling in the absurdity of her task, Zittel’s whimsical creations push an interaction between the human body and rectangles to the limit. Growing tired of the rectangle after a while, but wanting to continue to make clothes where a material is used in its rawest form, Zittel began making dresses from a single strand. Turning to crochet and like the rectangular Personal Panels, Zittel’s latest dresses grow out of a absurd but poetic logic.

Source - http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/andrea-zittel