33 Faces: On Sharing Creative Control

Wicked does not collaborate easily. The aesthetic is specific enough and the production process controlled enough that introducing another voice creates friction by default. That friction is not always productive. With the 33 Faces project, it was.

Mihaela Glavan came into the project with her own existing visual language — figure-based, densely worked, with a graphic sensibility that runs counter to the spare geometry we typically operate within. The question was not whether her work and ours were compatible. They were not, in any obvious way. The question was whether incompatibility could produce something that neither of us would have arrived at independently.

The Brief

There was no brief in the conventional sense. We gave her access to the atelier, to fabric samples from the current run, and to the production calendar. She made drawings. We made decisions about which of those drawings could be translated into a wearable surface — through embroidery, print, or as structural reference for construction. The process was iterative and occasionally contentious. Several of her drawings were technically impossible to execute at the quality level we require. Several of our suggested adaptations flattened the work in ways she would not accept.

What Remained

The final pieces — eight in total — carry visible evidence of both positions. The garment construction is ours: the silhouette, the seam placement, the material choices. The surface is hers: dense, figurative, difficult to read quickly. Taken together they produce a set of objects that neither of us would have made alone. That is the only justification for a collaboration. If the result could have been achieved without the other party, the collaboration was unnecessary. These pieces could not have been.