Thrillseekers take note: The Two Bridges neighborhood in downtown New York is currently haunted in the most delightful way with the installation of Brandon Morris’s ghost dresses at Europa Gallery on Division Street. Having fallen for the first of these sculptures, glimpsed briefly on a visit to Parsons in 2023, seeing them at Europa was a waking dream. Pretty as they are, Morris’s work also challenges the idea of what fashion is—or can be.
Entering into the main gallery space, you might feel like you’ve interrupted a game of Simon Says, one in which Simon had said “stop” and the participants were invisible. The poses Morris has captured look like they could be stop-motion, their green-tinted resin adding to a sense of liquidity and undulance. The simplest dress, number 6, which resembles a nightgown, seems to be grasping the side of her skirt; it’s a gesture that brings to mind Edward Gorey’s seemingly innocent, but not, Victorians. That’s the thing with this show—which is called “Actress,” by the way: Things are not quite what they seem. The idea of presence in absence is one that stood out for me.
Born in San Diego and raised in New Jersey, Morris’s initial exposure to art was through his art teacher mother; as a teen he began customizing his clothing. When he applied to Parsons it was to study fashion design, but after the first year, Morris was already leaning more towards art than garment-making and took a year off. It was during this time, he says, that he started taking “everything that I learned in fashion design, like construction, fully towards making my art.”
That said, one of Morris’s heroes is Martin Margiela. “I look at his work almost daily. When he was making his collections they weren’t labeled art, but I’d make the argument that he’s inspired just as many artists as he has designers.” Many of the Belgian’s collections were answers to a specific query, such as: how do you create clothes that are flat off the body, or what would it look like if you blew up doll’s clothing to specific proportions? Morris is similarly inquisitive. “I feel like most fashion, or even art, is like beauty for beauty’s sake…I like things that are made to solve something or answer a question…What makes [something] successful is if you’re able to answer it or not. The bonus is if you can make it look cool.” The ghost dresses meet both criteria.
The questions this exhibition raises are: “What would fashion look like if you remove the body entirely from the conversation? Which then leads to how could a dress stand on its own?” Morris explains. “What came of that is like, ‘Oh, it looks like a ghost.’ ” His first ghost dress was a dress made of a “filmy plastic material” which was supported, in a wobbly way, by a tube. A fellow student introduced Morris to the fiberglass from which the dresses are now made before they are painted over with the green-dyed resin.
Morris designs the garments from patterns he creates with the aid of CLO 3D. They are inspired by Victorian children’s wear which he researches on eBay, being fascinated by their hand construction and decorative elements. “I look at the Victorian dresses themselves as artwork because they’re beautiful and there are all these ruffles and whatnot. I have always loved spending time constructing something.”
“Actress” builds on Morris’s training at Parsons. “When I was transitioning from making clothing at school into making more sculptural work, I still wanted to take elements from the fashion world, such as branding. Branding is a big thing in fashion, everything has a tag or a label, and I wanted to see how I could play with that idea in more fine art and sculpture. My original plan was to make this fictional brand called Actress, and then brand the sculptures in some way with the label. But I scrapped that idea.” In doing so, Morris said, he was following the lead of Bless, the cult label that operates between Berlin and Paris and operates outside the conventional fashion system.
Coloring outside the lines, as it were, is one of the most important takeaways from this exhibition. Morris says he doesn’t think he could work in fashion because he’s unwilling to sacrifice his creative freedom. Both the pace of the industry and the fact that brands are often working to satisfy shareholders seem to inhibit creativity rather than foster it. But Morris’s vision is a generous one. “All of the artists and designers that I’ve looked up to inspired me in some way, and I want to be a part of that to inspire the next set of people that want to make something,” he says. “I don’t think there has to be a defining line between fashion and art…and I think there could possibly be a way to combine the two or create a whole other genre of fashion/design-esque art.”
“Actress” is on view through February 9, 2025.
