Maia Gorton

The Incarnations of Lilith

Positioning myself between costume and fashion design, my concept follows the story of the vampire primordial woman, Lilith, who has lived through the ages. Her dark origins lie in Babylonian demonology... In the Middle Ages she reappears in Jewish sources as the dreadful first wife of Adam. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo portrayed Lilith as a half-woman, half-serpent, coiled around the Tree of Knowledge.

Because her tale travels and morphs with each incarnation, I have chosen to fill in the blanks of her life for my collection, creating the corsets she has worn as different versions of herself throughout time, each of which will have stylistic ties to a specific time period and will allude to what this vampire has encountered. Using historical craftsmanship, the construction of my garments expresses the confluence of tradition and metamorphosis of the intimate possessions that Lilith would carry over her lifetime.