American designer Ken Tanabe has employed a selection of uncommon resources such as balloons, videotapes and CDs to form option Halloween costumes.
Tanabe has invested the last twelve many years creating substitutes to store-purchased Halloween outfits, producing a new costume every single year.
“I enjoy Halloween, but I observed that people’s costumes tend to stick to the same patterns each and every yr,” Tanabe advised Dezeen.
“The typical costume is keep-bought, overpriced, and some thing recognisable from pop culture. And every thing is attractive or dead – or both! I made a decision I would do the precise opposite of these things.”
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This year, he has used letter-shaped silver mylar balloons to generate a futuristic inflatable disguise. An A, two Hs and 4 Y-shaped balloons type his Chrome Cloud costume.
The A balloon has been turned upside down to kind a helmet, the Hs generate arm coverings, and the Ys attach to the side of the body to generate lobster-like inflatable claws.
“The costume reminds me of balloon sculptures by artist Keff Koons, and the ‘stuffed’ search of some runway fashion by Comme des Garçons,” he stated. “Since my costumes are usually geometric, it was entertaining to attempt something softer.”
In earlier many years, the designer has develop a bright yellow large priest outfit, a his-and-hers set of hinged pink armour inspired by the winged protective gear worn by vikings, and an outfit that lamented the death of CDs and DVDs with a set of wearable disc-covered cubes.
“Men and women typically see my costumes as robotic, but I believe of them as natural and belonging to nature,” Tanabe mentioned.
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Tanabe’s 2011 costume featured giant scoop-hands, which have been “created for rapid assortment of small ‘fun-sized’ halloween candy”, although his 2010 Orange Lantern outfit borrowed on the shapes of paper lanterns and the narratives identified in Japanese ghost stories.
The designer frequently makes use of low-cost, easily available materials – this kind of as his 2004 costume which was developed from hundreds of discarded videotapes connected to wearable cubes.
“I like purchasing at locations like Ikea and the hardware shop,” he said. “This yr, I noticed people silver balloons shaped like letters of the alphabet and believed ‘I wonder if I could put on people?’.”
French artist Gwen van den Eijnde also employed everyday supplies such as paper, plastic bags and toothpicks for his Baroque-inspired collection of theatrical costumes.
One of the restrictions Tanabe places on his designs is that every single costume expenses all around \$40 or significantly less, and the total specifics of components utilised are listed alongside the images of his yearly outfits on his web site.
“One particular massive challenge is to hold items fresh each year,” he advised Dezeen. “Yet another challenge is to give the costumes structural integrity in addition to aesthetic value. Folks educated in graphic layout, like myself, are typically most inventive when there are design constraints.”
