When Hai-Wen Lin was getting a master’s in fashion design, they started creating clothing that could be thrown off the human body and used by the nonhuman world instead—including kites that Lin calls “couture for the wind.”
Chicago-based Lin designed and constructed this cotton and silk piece, Sunday, April 2nd 5:13–7:31pm, in 2023. They started by observing the abstract shapes that raindrops make when pooled on surfaces, scaling them up, and tracing them onto fabric. “Then, using what I knew from fashion and pattern making,” says Lin, “I cut spaces for my body in the raindrops—for example, where an arm could pass through it.”
Lin then dyed the piece—which is also rich in symbolism from traditional Chinese clothing—in photosensitive cyanotype chemicals and wore it on a four-mile walk. “The way the sunlight fell on my body and all the things that affected that, such as the trees I passed—those became poetic materials embedded in the piece,” Lin says. To develop the cyanotype, they entered the water of Lake Michigan. When they emerged, the material had turned blue. Later they toned it in black tea.
“My long-term dream project is to create a fashion show that occurs in the sky,” says Lin, who has made several such kites. You can see some of them in person at the Ground Floor biennial at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center through March 16.
Karen Olson is editor in chief of American Craft.
