NOTES

From BAROQUE BAROQUE, THE CULTURE OF EXCESS, STEPHEN CALLOWAY

“The impulse to follow through, from the creation of a single, individual object, to the natural conclusion of controlling the overall context, leads textile designers to want to make their fabrics up into clothes or to create interiors. Jane Wildgoose, whose rich hand-printed silks and velvets alternate between abundant baroque and no less opulent classicizing designs, found herself drawn towards the making of idiosyncratic garments. Experiments such as a Don Juan corset, made up from a fabric patterned on the outside with suggestive key-hole motifs, whilst inside are observed tiny, exquisitely drawn erotic scenes, revealed a talent for re-inventing the past with an arch humour and considerable panache. As a result other commissions have followed for costumes for stage and film, including a baroque theatre-piece, Polite Conversation, and the gloomy and fetishistic movie, Hellraiser, for which Wildgoose stitched black leather suits resembling the écorché figures of a seventeenth-century artist's studio to create an entirely modern frisson.”

Baroque Baroque, the culture of excess, Stephen Calloway, Phaidon, 1994 p209