Sam Higham

My project, Fancy Dress, explored the relationship between art, sculpture, and performance through fashion design. I was interested in how clothing can function as both costume and character, transforming the body into an active site of performance.

Drawing from fifteenth-century Italian theatre, I reinterpreted Commedia dell’Arte archetypes and aligned them with contemporary figures to examine how form, material, and gesture construct and destabilise identity. The act of wearing became performative, allowing each garment to shift between fiction and self-expression.

Throughout the project, I experimented with smocking, pleating, and leather construction to build sculptural silhouettes that expressed personality through texture and proportion. The collection is grounded in menswear but uses it as a framework to explore exaggeration, vulnerability, and theatricality, qualities often absent from traditional male dress.

Fancy Dress is significant because it frames fashion as a living dialogue between body and performance. It contributes a perspective that treats dressing as both an artistic and social act, where narrative and self are continuously negotiated through what we wear.