My name is Sabrina and I am a designer from Germany. Read along if you are interested to hear how this jacket came to life in 2019. It all started with a plain, boring white cotton jacket, hanging way to long in the closet of 18-year-old me. And it was that time, I discovered my love for audiobooks – which I still cultivate today – so I began listening to Lewis C. Carolls most famous book, Alice in Wonderland.
I have to admit, the story was kind of confusing, wild and way less linear than it appeared in the well-known movies made out of it – but still I was fascinated and could not stop thinking about this strange world and its magical inhabitants. So that’s when one came to another, I bought myself some fancy finger paint and a huge box of 3d textile paint bottles in every color you can imagine. And orange dying salt. Why exactly? I can ‘t tell anymore – I guess it was the curiosity how dying at home would turn out.
It turned out to be messy. And great fun! And a lot of cleaning afterwards… Because I only wanted the arms and the bottom part of the jacket to be orange, it took a lot of creative rearranging to hang only the right parts in the hot salty kitchen pot and to not flood the rest of the kitchen when removing the part dipped before.
Now having the first step completed during one afternoon, it took 40 hours spread over a month in total to complete the second step: the actual painting.
Starting off with the base, I took some hardly pigmented weird wobbly finger textile paint for children, found at a local supermarket (imagine it the consistency of jello) and swirled blue and red directly on textile together for that beautiful magically alive purple background. Now that looked good.
And then off to the motives. At that time, I would spend afternoons after school till late night in my bedroom on the floor, listening to Alice in Wonderland and painting till I fell asleep, so excited and captured by my project. The iconic white rabbit was the first one to come alive. His blue cloak, vest ruffles as well as overall statue were of course heavily influenced by the movie. But my favorite parts turned out to be the pink ear and the red eye because of the fine blending. Always late, always late – it echoed endlessly in my head while completing the golden pocket watch. As I drew during the dim nights, I sometimes got surprised in the morning by how interesting a colorful shadow turned out in daylight.
Passing on to the mad hatters’ hat with its red band, card and funny jewelry the 3D paint really earned its name. The golden spirals and red hairlocks are so thick you can run your finger over it and think it is still wet.
And third the playing cards, resembling the empire of the queen of hearts. All of this got embedded in a wild fantasy setting surrounded by greens and blues and oranges, contrasting the purple background.
Now, the final step was to iron the vest to fix the paint, and you can tell I was very worried about that. The layers of paint hat stiffened the fabric, and it was unclear if the heat would melt away the 3D elements, leaving mush where my defined locks lay. Luckily it didn’t, although it took away about a third of the height of the paint.
Dyed, painted, fixed – the jacket is finished! Here we are, an Alice in wonderland inspired unique piece of clothing. The only thing left was collecting some props and running out in the woods to make a photoshoot
Feel free to contact me for any questions IG: @miss_sabrina_sunshine
Hope this brought you some joy and insight
Sabrina Kliese
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