“The demons in your mind, they flower there”
A collaborative project with Natalie Sim

Click the links below to view our slides:

Week 3 – Ideation Presentation 

Week 4 – Development Presentation

Week 5 – Design Draft Presentation

FINAL PRESENTATION

 

Title of project:

The demons in your mind, they flower there

Concept write up:

We were inspired by the quote by Nathaniel Hobs Jenkins, “Beauty becomes ugly under the influence of the demons inside the mind.”

We are all beautiful people, perfect white flowers waiting to bloom. Yet, we still crave perfect beauty, endlessly pursuing it. In our attempts to reach that beauty, the demons in our minds tell us that the perfection we hope to achieve is still far away. We attempt to chase after the epitome of beauty but drown in the concept of what true perfection is. Now, when we look at ourselves, because we overthink, because we have no self-love or because we are too harsh on ourselves, we warp our beauty into what we think is inner demons- ugliness and pain that other people don’t see. The disgusting flesh hiding within the perfect exterior of a white flower bud. We think that these demons are the representation of our raw selves, our true flesh. We tell ourselves that the beauty people say we have is just a plain white mask, and that they don’t see the ugliness hiding beneath it.

Our ugliness is on the inside solely because it comes from within- it is the demons in our own minds that have manifested the ugly in ourselves. The beauty we each have in ourselves is lost upon us, becoming imperfect and ruined in our own eyes. It is never enough, and the voices in our heads whisper confirmations of our failures.

Explanation:

We wanted a dress that looks simple, pure and pretty from the outside to represent the beauty that everyone has within them. We then wanted our transformation to be very visceral,  a full contrast of this pretty exterior- our flowers would open up to reveal a disgusting bloody flesh, instead of the expected beautiful flower. With this stark change in aesthetics, we wanted to show how people are afflicted by their own minds. How from the outside, others can see that we possess something so beautiful, but in our own heads, we just think the worst of ourselves. We’re not ugly/imperfect because we are, but because we think that that is what we truly are. Hence, this ugliness appears only on the inside and blooms like a flower from within our own minds.
We hope that with our dress, people might feel comforted that they’re not alone in this, and that this is a problem many others face as well. Or that people who don’t really have this issue with themselves might now be aware that this is an issue that some people face. And in all, we wanted people to know that despite some of us maybe thinking we have “a fake beautiful façade that conceals the true horrific flesh other people don’t see”, that in itself can be beautiful as well- We hoped that even with our flowers open, our dress still looks as pretty, or even prettier than when the flowers were closed

 

Model: Natalie Sim

Model: Natalie Sim