SUZANNE
BFA COLLECTION
This collection is a tribute to my mother, Suzanne Simpson, who lost her life to domestic violence in October 2024. Suzanne is an investigation into the bond between a mother and her child the way it persists, shape shifts, and refuses to dissolve even when separated by death. Drawing on the language of clothing as memory, I explore how garments hold the body of a person long after they are gone: the weight of a sleeve, the curve of a collar, the softness of fabric worn close to skin. The collection is built from my mother’s university wardrobe of the 1990s, decontextualized through the domestic geometry of 1970s McCall’s and Simplicity patterns sewing as an act of return, of handling what she once handled, of tracing the shape of her life with my own hands. Garments are stitched together and deliberately bonded, materializing the thesis that a mother’s relationship with her child has no true seam no point at which one ends and the other begins. At the center of the collection is a custom deer print, developed as a personal homage to one of my earliest memories: watching the deer with my mother outside my grandfather’s house. The print is not decoration. It is documentation. Suzanne is ultimately an act of grief made wearable a daughter’s attempt to keep dressing the woman who first dressed her.
“SUZANNE IS THE SPIRIT WHO REFUSES TO LEAVE, THE EMBODIMENT OF SACRIFICE AND UNCONDITIONAL LOVE”
RESEARCH
My starting research of my collection consisted of archives of my mother’s wardrobe from her years at university. Looking through old photographs, I choose 4 distinct archetypes of garments to be grounding points throughout the collection, the dress shirt, the denim jacket, the bomber jacket, and the relaxed denim jeans. Following this, I began draping experimentation where I collectively blend the concept of to becoming one, directly inspired by the 1970s simplicity double dress shirt pattern. This was the base of my collection, as garments are sewn in, stitched, and snapped into one another symbolizing the spiritual bond between my mother from heaven and earth.
TEXTILE
The color palette displayed throughout the collection is my joyful resistance to grief. My mother was more than just a human being, she is light. The memory of my mother is has been imprinted deeply in my heart in mind. I choose to parallel the mark she left on my heart by developing my own series of prints and centralizing them in each look within the collection. The deer print was initially taken from the earliest memories I have of my mother, taking me to my grandfathers house, where does and fawns frolicked in the yard eating grass. For my process, I used my school sublimation machine to manually print every textile in the collection.
