Designing Trace: a Q&A with Georgia Lazzaro and Crystal Dunn

Georgia Lazzaro is currently in New York on an internship with Narciso Rodriguez and Calvin Klein and Crystal Dunn works for Melbourne-based label MATERIALBYPRODUCT. Early in the year Georgia and Crystal came together to design costumes for Alice Topp’s Trace, an intimate pas de deux performed by Vivienne Wong and Calvin Hannaford for Bodytorque.à la mode. We spoke to Georgia and Crystal about how they transformed basic hosiery into costumes fit for the ballet stage.

What has it been like working as the only design duo in Bodytorque?
We’ve really enjoyed working together, and have found that our thinking has been in sync the whole way through. It has been so great to have another person to bounce ideas off and get ideas from.

Do you find your ideas complement one another?
The Trace costumes are almost a perfect intersection of our ideas and ways of thinking. We are both fascinated by gesture; the motions of garments; the actions of bodies; the way the two relate to each other. We are both very interested in the language of fashion, and in the way fashion, objects, images and events relate to the living body.

Have you worked as a partnership before?
Not really, although at uni we spent time critiquing each others’ work. We will definitely work together in the future, though!

How did you respond to Alice’s choreographic concept during the initial stages?
When we read Alice’s outline of her concept for the piece – an intimate pas de deux exploring the traces of moments and memories – we were very excited as we felt it fit so perfectly with ideas that we had already been exploring for the Bodytorque promotional images, which we styled.

We brought in a few photos and videos that we had taken and showed them to Alice, who really loved them. From the beginning, all three of us felt that the costume design was to be an integral element in the piece, rather than clothing applied at the end. So our first response was to send Alice a collection of toiles (trial garments) to start experiment with while the company was in Sydney.

The costumes you have designed almost take on their own dance vocabulary as the dancers twist, stretch and shed the fabric on stage. How did you design the pieces without seeing the dancers in action? Was this a challenge?
The costumes in Trace are everyday intimate garments – camisoles and hosiery – which are opened up with fine incisions. These incisions open up new spaces for the body, allowing the dancers to work with generic objects in fresh and dynamic ways. Because of the costume’s importance in the choreography, we worked very closely with Alice, Vivienne and Calvin. The development of the costumes was very much a process of trial and error. We attended rehearsals in order to develop the objects in tandem with the dance (which included snipping through hosiery on the floor of the ballet studios).

Because we spent time with the garments, working with our own bodies, we had some sense of how things would look. However, seeing them for the first time on Calvin and Vivienne’s bodies with Alice’s direction was incredibly rewarding. We could never have predicted just how beautifully she would respond to our initial ideas. The challenges for us were negotiating technical difficulties, as the piece was formed via the natural intersection of our visions.

One of our key technical considerations was the tenacity of the materials. As the costumes are used quite rigorously, it was important that the pieces were able to withstand the force applied to them. With this, we got so much great feedback from Alice and the dancers, allowing us to develop costumes which truly extend from and support the dancers’ bodies.

Which designers do you admire?
Georgia is inspired by designers Raf Simons, Jil Sander, Francisco Costa for Calvin Klein, Narciso Rodriguez and Helmut Lang, while Crystal is much more excited by theorists and writers, such as Roland Barthes, Gaston Bachelard and Michel de Certeau, or photographers, such as Horst P. Horst and Mark Borthwick.

What have you learned about fashion since you graduated?
That it gets more and more exciting.

What are you working on outside of Bodytorque?
Georgia is currently in New York interning with Narciso Rodriguez and Calvin Klein, while Crystal works in garment production and image-making with MATERIALBYPRODUCT.

What everyday things inspire you?
The archetypal things: a singlet, a pair of stockings, a pile of clothing on the floor, the way a bra strap slips off your shoulder. The ubiquity of these objects makes them such powerful and intimate symbols.

Beauty is …
Anything so refined it exists only as a gesture.

Bodytorque.à la mode plays in Sydney 27 – 30 May