Kanmani P S
BSc in Fashion Design and Garment Management
Celestial Lament – JD Design Awards 2024
Kanmani P S, BSc student in Fashion Design and Garment Management Conceptualized a collection Celestial Lament, Autumn/ Winter 2025 A fashion collection inspired from Lars von Trier’s Cinematic masterpiece: “Melancholia” Dedicated to the protagonist Justine Desolately Romantic and Resilient, in a Post-Apocalyptic world, Captures survival amidst reality with an otherworldly charm through avant-garde silhouettes, darkly enigmatic tones in black, brown shades, and raw textures- sense of desolation and survivalist chic, a reminder of Justine’s cinematic journey Topics of existence, resilience, and transcendence come alive in the designs to make one introspect and reflect. Celestial Lament restyles fashion as the narrative that appeals to all those who seek emotional depth and intellectual engagement in their sartorial choices.
ILLUSTRATIONS & BOARD
Similar to Lars von Trier’s movie “Melancholia,” this collection dives into an apocalyptic, dystopian world where fragile beauty is interwoven with the cruelness of survival. Like characters, who are not merely miserable and frail before the impending apocalypse but yet have the power to be resilient, the avant-garde designs repeat this kind of narrative journey. They envision an imaginative world in which survival demands the symbiosis of functionality and high fashion, where the human spirit’s survival is manifested in the creativity of its people. Coming under the macro theme of “future fiction”, though certainly more than speculation, it offers a timely reflection on the human condition in the context of imagined subhuman endurance through conflict unimaginable. Thus, essentially, the collection is a kind of visual storytelling leading the reader through cinema and fashion to that level of introspection and utter amazement about what humanity might be like in a post-apocalyptic world.
JDDA 2024
The “Celestial Lament” collection intricately weaves a story of resilience and adaptation with a broadly collected palette of materials and textures. The raw material package is largely formed of distressed denim, sheer fabrics, cotton net, and an eclectic mix of various textiles, all chosen for specific effects. Distressed denim was rugged resilience; shear fabrics echoed ethereal elegance. The use of cotton net gives softness to the otherwise hard realities that are presented, and a diverse mix of texture speaks of complexity in survival in an apocalyptic dystopian world.
This set exhibits a broad spectrum in color, such as black, brown and rusty brown tones. Black is the shade of shadows and darkness. One would not be familiar with what existed within a dystopian landscape; on the other hand, brown symbolizes earthiness in survival as well as raw textures that nature provides. Rusty tones symbolize resilience and transformation towards adaptation, decay and rebirth echoing within such surroundings.
This is a collection that, by blending all these different fabrics and colors, starts to build together this cohesive narrative, which then picks up the content of resilience and survival in the face of really harsh realities. Each piece and each color contributes to this overall concept, and it invites the wearer to explore the fact of human experiences through the lens of fashion.
Kanmani P S
BSc in Fashion Design and Garment Management
www.jddesignawards.com
