MODA 2016: the Mad Max costumes

John wrote this for his old site:

I was recently asked to design costumes for the MODA 2016 show, benefitting the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation. The Industry Salon requested "Mad Max" style costumes for their models to wear in the show.

The photographs on that page follow the models from the dressing room to the runway. Most of the costumes are built around armor: molded chest plates, shoulder guards, straps and buckles, worn over bare skin or dark clothing. Two models have the number 4045 and a barcode painted across their stomachs. One man wears a pair of curling horns on a headband, with long white hair falling behind them, and is shown twice: once in profile under blue light and once settling the horns into place.

On the runway the costumes move through smoke and colored light, in a line of models walking toward the crowd.

Designing for a crowd goes back a long way for John. In The Artist and the Algorithm he writes that as a young adult he worked with a team designing nightclubs, some of them 40,000 square feet, and within a few years became their art director. One club stays with him:

One of my favorites was called Gotham, inspired by Gotham City.

He describes it as dark surrealism meeting industrial art, and sums up the period this way:

Those were wild years. I got to create on a giant scale, and there was art everywhere you looked.

His biography at the end of the book lists themed environments among the work that came before his large-scale metal sculptures.