Creating a Fashion Collection Based on the Visual Aesthetics of Breathlessness and Thomas Mann's «The Magic Mountain»

Fashion as a cultural phenomenon has always been affected by a number of exterior factors, reacting to the occurring changes and adapting to the public demands accordingly. It is in the past when diseases such as tuberculosis were as widespread as they were incurable that their societal perception became associated with conventional beauty standards as perceiving the raging illness as something aesthetically desirable. The aesthetics of illness were first formed around the nineteenth century due to the proliferation of the ‘consumptive chic’ trend, which was, in other words, an obsessive emulation of the effects of respiratory diseases for their association with typically feminine traits (such as thinness, weakness and pale complexion). Eventually, it became a quintessential part of the Victorian dark romanticism movement. In regard to the fact that each large-scale infectious outbreak has notably affected the social environment and the arts, it may be speculated that contemporary fashion, being the industry that is well established in its ability to both influence and be influenced by external events, will undergo a major stylistic shift because of the ongoing global pandemic. As seen through the means of visual research, pandemics throughout humanity’s existence share the notion and presence of an aesthetic which is directly influenced by the results of the epidemic itself, thus said aesthetic deals with dark themes such as death and its derivatives. This research investigates key narratives of the aesthetics of illness and distinguishes fixed visual tropes and ideas that it exploits. Given that this aesthetic is reoccurring, it can be suggested, in theory, that the aforementioned aesthetic will soon experience a form of a renaissance in direct correlation to the current state of the world, which will further solidify and define it as a genre and style within art in general. The aim of this project therefore would be to develop a clothing collection inspired by the aforementioned movement and, thus, the illness itself. This printed matter of both visual and written research covers documented evidence and artworks related to the subject from the 1880s to 2020 and explores the relationship between real-life instances and their artistic iterations, allowing to sort them into selected categories based on the found principles and visual codes in order to elaborate on how they can be implemented into the design through the process of a concept development, creation of silhouettes, prints and toiles resulting in a final garment collection.