Eiko's Dress

This is a thought experiment I use to allow conceptual pieces to come to life in my mind. They then don't even need to be made. I watch the film once in my mind & the piece is complete.

If Eiko Matsuda were alive today, she would go to the Academy Awards ceremony in an incredible dress. She would be the daring darling of the awards, up against Olivia Coleman and Anna Taylor Joy. Can you imagine what that experience would have been like for her? Getting nominated, and planning this incredible experience. I imagine the pictures, they come from a mash up of Billie Eilish's generously personal and seemingly genuine feed, and a steady diet of Vanity Fair.

She would get a dress designed. Maybe by someone special, maybe by a risk taker, by someone who understands the erotic, someone who is in a constant state of becoming. So Harris Reed makes her, 26 year old Eiko Matsuda, a bespoke dress inspired by the layers and layers of luscious, puddling silk that pervade the film's imagery.

She would spend the day getting ready to put it on, every detail, every hair, every gem, who she wanted to be, who she wanted the world to see. She would put lotion on the tattoo on her ear.

She would slide it on in the afternoon, this incredible, impossible, sexy, fluid Oscar look, and hold her breath, and maybe win, and maybe not, but the night would be an impossible dream, filled with chaos and clarity. A night she would never want to forget.

I want to ask Harris Reed to make this outfit for Eiko. But no one will ever wear it. I will make images of it in the taxi on the way to the party, laughing with other people, running down the hallway, kissing her lover, falling asleep, hanging on the door, bare toes over the end of the bed, a little spinny. So late. So happy. So exhausted. So glad its over. So surreal.

We will put this outfit in a display case and put the case away in storage at (?? Where to do this?? Meaningful location TBA). There will be no photographs of it released to the publilc, but sketches are ok. But it will never be photographed because it will never be worn. One. One photograph can be released of it on the mannequin, like it is about to be shown to her. But that's it. Away it goes. No. No photos.

I will try this in the studio. Make a paper rendition of this dress in enormous scale as it moves through its evening, a larger-than-life memory of something that never happened, but should have. When Harris has a retrospective show in ten years or so at the V and A, we will unveil the unworn dress.

But maybe as much as I love Harris Reed, Maybe I’ll make it.

Our Eiko. Patron Saint of those who hold space to see the story of subjugation and erasure go differently for all women and non-binary people in the future.