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If your psycho girlfriend started a clothing line, what would it look like?

Wait, on second thought, don’t bother asking her—since there’s no way it could be nearly as cool as Vanessa Bonet and Kasey McMahon’s line, you’d probably just end up with a keyed car if you did. Bonet and McMahon have taken fashion to new heights (or new levels of mental instability, depending on how you look at it) with their LA-based “wearable art” design collaboration Psycho Girlfriend, which they founded in 2004.

Not your average couture fashion, Psycho Girlfriend pieces are one of a kind, sculptural creations that blend expected materials, like tulle fabric, leather and vinyl with decidedly unconventional mediums—plastic sporks, bent aluminum, steel, titanium, doll heads, mouse fur, bugs, circuit boards, foam pool noodles, and live hamsters, to name a few. But don’t let the list of bizarre components fool you—this is no hodge-podge, arts-n-crafts hobby, this is high art. Each piece takes weeks to build and is so precisely and carefully constructed, that standing among them in the Psycho Girlfriend warehouse, I feel museum-level hushed reverence wash over me. It’s true, the pieces are that beautiful. They’re also totally, insanely playful and bursting with ironic humor and unapologetic in-your-faceness. (So much so that they make you do crazy things, like invent new words.)

“People don’t really know how to categorize our stuff because it’s wearable…it would be great to break through that wall and hear people say, ‘wow that’s a really beautiful sculpture,’ as opposed to, ‘that’s a really weird dress,’” says Bonet. While it’s true that some of the pieces were created with Burning Man costuming in mind, the designs quickly evolved to become much more than that, and to incorporate each woman’s unique creative voice.

McMahon classifies her artistic style as “cerebral,” while Bonet is primarily a large-scale sculptor with the “desire to make fun of all aspects of life…and pull [people] out of their comfort zone.” McMahon’s work, on the other hand, conveys a running theme of “housings within housings,” and typically emphasizes the merging of technology with nature. Her recent “Birdcage Dress,” for instance, is a wearable metal birdcage in the shape of a huge tiered hoopskirt, which houses real birds and rolls along on wheels as the wearer walks within it. Well, “walks” may be a stretch. “Stands and occasionally shuffles” is more like it. Either way, the dress juxtaposes delicate beauty with industrial workmanship in a way I’ve never quite seen before.

In fact, the entire Psycho Girlfriend line is built with an eye towards thought provoking details—similar to say, a date with a less-than-mentally-stable romantic partner, you never quite know what to expect.  But then again, the expected has never really interested McMahon or Bonet. “We’ve talked about making a line that’s accessible,” says McMahon. “The ultimate decision was, wow, that’d be really boring.”

Check out some Psycho Girlfriend pieces below, and view even more at www.yourpsychogirlfriend.com.

Words by Christine Spehar, photos by Suzan Jones

 

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