Seattle fashion designer and artist Sophy Wong has never shied away from crossing disciplines.
Her experience in the local fashion scene has consistently colored outside the lines, incorporating elements like 3D-printed sculptures, cosplay inspirations, and programmable, LED-loaded electronics. The results make for a dazzling Instagram finger-swipe of colors, lights, and forms.
Her first-ever appearance at Bumbershoot is similarly on-brand: you can call Symbiosis a “fashion show” if you dare, but the way Wong tells it, that label only scratches at the surface.
Professional dancers, whose backgrounds include ballet and Mexican folk dance. A '90s trip-hop soundtrack. Characters who’ve returned to Earth after traveling through the far reaches of space for 400 years, with wild outfits to match. And a “story bible,” which Wong says is subliminally driven by “all the sci-fi and anime” she watches but formally namechecks a sci-fi legend: “the Isaac Asimov idea that civilization continues,” Wong says. “Regeneration, rebirth, hope.”
The story of Symbiosis is told largely by seven signature Wong outfits, which are all inspired by spacesuits. “They’re a technology barrier that keeps us away from our environment,” Wong says.
The climate crisis prompted Wong to reimagine the traditional space suit, enough so that she wants to have anyone looking at her fashion show have their own Planet of the Apes moment of realization: “The twist is, you [may one day have to wear these] here.”
While some of Wong’s most impressive works to date have leaned on LED lights and thick plastics, she’s opting for more organic designs for Symbiosis. It’s a daytime show, so Wong is skipping her usual light arrangements; sunlight would otherwise drown those out. Her typical reliance on 3D-printed materials remains intact, but at this show, they’re sewn into intentionally floral and Earth-toned prints. In one visually striking touch, Wong stitches the shimmering light bounces of satin into a 3D printing material known as “bifurcated filament”—in short, a type of plastic that has a different, complementary, shimmering color on each side. The result looks bioluminescent.
This show’s approach to fabrication is suited for its sci-fi concept, where biological forms grow onto and become one with any attire. In Wong’s vision of future Earth, spacesuits and native biology may fuse to become indistinguishable: combined organisms, adapting to survive on a rapidly changing planet. By slowing the speed of a 3D printer and stretching its printed, corn-derived material just so, Wong is able to produce sparkling, barnacle-like cones and other ephemeral “growths” that dot many of her costume designs.
Smaller, self-contained, 3D-printed projects were Wong’s first steps into an eventual passion for fashion design. About a decade ago, she began dabbling with 3D printers on a lark outside her day job as a graphic designer: “3D printing activated the kind of digital workflow that I was already comfortable with in 2D,” she says. Her aspirations evolved from small, easily printed projects like earrings to fully blown cosplay creations, and the latter excited her in a similar way: “[Cosplay is] a design challenge to translate someone else's vision, someone else's 2D design, into a physical form, into a reality.”
Her rising passion for cosplay led to figuring out how to operate as an all-in-one design shop—and perhaps more importantly, to take a step back from the process and embrace cosplay’s hard-to-pigeonhole spirit. “Now I'm pulling from [so many disciplines] to create something, and I want it to live in a confusing space between: Is this fashion? Is it costume? Is it art? Is it something new? That is more comfortable to me than making something that someone looks at, and they come to an easy answer.”
Wong continues to challenge fashion conventions with her shoulder shrug at the catwalk: “I find that really boring, personally. And I knew that I wanted to do something different, from the total inside veins of the show to the outside skin of it.” Wong is a dancer, and casting local dancers for Symbiosis was a natural addition to the show’s storytelling ambitions. “Dancers are born to perform,” Wong says. “You can give them a concept, an idea, and a character, and they can run with it.”
The story, then, for anyone reading ahead of the show: Earth’s citizens fled the planet roughly 400 years ago, but failed to find anywhere that was more hospitable and are trying to come back. Two astronauts went on a pilot mission, only to vanish. Wong’s story begins with a third astronaut, wearing the show’s most “classic” spacesuit, returning to the planet, where she has found that the other lost astronauts have become the titular “symbiotes” who’ve adapted to the changed landscape. Eventually, four other “adapted” life forms come into contact with our hero, and while they’ve blended more fully with a changed, otherworldly landscape, they still share functional and aesthetic lineage with the least adapted astronaut: mesh breathing patches; “vestigial” helmets in the forms of ornate collars; and The Fifth Element-like belt harnesses.
“Over time, these creatures are finding a way to survive, because we're providing a substrate and resources for them,” Wong says. “They are doing the thing that plants and creatures in the environment do: they absorb the toxins, scrub the air, and do all of that great stuff. They are rehabilitating the planet.” For Wong, then, her dream is for viewers to rethink our relationship with “protective” gear on our real-life, rapidly changing Earth: “Maybe it’s less of a barrier to protect us from the environment and more like, could it help us merge with our environment?”
As the show lacks outright narration, Wong’s vision does more to unify the show conceptually and visually than it does to shove a clear ecological message down viewers’ throats. And that sense of progression and evolution within one show may continue on with more shows to come—as Wong already has a concept board smothered in spacesuits, plot ideas, and sci-fi inspirations (including a Star Trek: The Next Generation photo of Deanna Troi, Whoopi Goldberg, and Gates McFadden, who Wong calls out as “the holy trinity”).
“I want to do all the rest of these [show concepts] eventually,” Wong says about the other scribbled concepts on her studio wall. Bumbershoot called at just the right time to get an initial concept beamed from her imagination to our planet, she suggests. Then Wong gestures at the fuller board: “This is my universe that I want to create. Symbiosis is just one planet.”
Sophy Wong presents her collection, Symbiosis, in Bumbershoot’s Fashion District Saturday, August 31 and Sunday, September 1 at 5:10 pm.
