Hitting the right note
Music and fashion collide when a trained composer decided to channel her creative energy into designing clothes, writes
WHEN Kedah native Alice Jane, 38, was studying to become a music composer in Germany, she was taught the ways of Beethoven and Chopin, and what made these two classical composers so renowned.
It’s something not immediately obvious to modern listeners but their music was ground-breaking and unlike anything that was in existence at the time. They made music for the future. And that was something Jane’s professors wanted to impress on their students.
“We were taught to move beyond the typical chords you hear in pop music and to create something new and modern,” she says of her time at the University of Music Freiburg. “We study a lot of art as well, to understand the concepts and thoughts of being a modernist to try and create something different.”
A progressive curriculum and Germany’s vibrant creative scene helped expand Jane’s artistic sensibility. There is freedom in creation, she says.
But resigned to the fact that she would not be able to survive as a modern music composer in Malaysia, Jane ventured into fashion. She started by bringing the likes of Givenchy and Balenciaga to local customers, then launching her own label A-Jane in 2016.
FRAYED EDGES
“The first collection is called Influence and it was influenced by my music but not entirely,” says Jane at the A-Jane workshop and store in Bangsar. (She has another store in Johor Baru).
“The second collection is Dissonance and it is closer to how I make my music, which is not in the correct tone. If you hear it you’d think it’s weird, it’s not nice.”
This translates to garments that are asymmetrical and have raw, unfinished edges. She plays with proportions through boxy tops and voluminous trousers, while her colours are bold and sometimes clashing. It’s “not nice”, if compared to classic gowns and minimalist attire but it’s unique and true to her creative values.
Jane will present her third collection at the upcoming Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week this month. She’s showing the fashion version of the musical concept repetition - by not having any.
Music often relies on repeated elements. When sounds play over and over in a pattern, it creates a melody that people remember. But that’s not what Jane was trained to do, and that’s not what she wants to show in her designs.
“My composition doesn’t have repetition, meaning there are no repeated elements,” she says. “It’s also a philosophy of how you see things. When you see two sleeves that look the same, you see the symmetry. But my design is asymmetrical and I’m taking it even further than asymmetry.”
One example is a bib collar that one of her designers is sewing. It has several layers of fabric sewn into rectangles of various lengths and sizes. The concept of no repetition means that no two rectangles have the exact same shape. The construction is elaborate and takes about a week to make.
She also shows me a half-finished blouse with pleat detail. None of the pleats have the same width and not all the folds are parallel to one another. The pleats are neither mirrored nor identical on both right and left side. “What I’m doing is to show that there is no repetition, and that it can look nice too. People are used to seeing things that are organised and minimal, but minimal is repetition. I want to challenge the boundaries of repetition and minimalism,” she explains. TONNES OF IDEAS Given the studied detail in which her garments are made, they do not come cheap. The top that Jane is wearing during our photoshoot retails for almost US$500 on her website a-jane.com - that’s more than RM2,000. But she has a second label called AByJane, where the designs are simpler and the price point is less than RM600.
“When I design AByJane, I think of colours because A-Jane only has 16 looks and so I have to be particular with the colour selection. AByJane will have 30 looks and it’s a simplified version of A-Jane. I might have an idea for big sleeves but for AByJane I can’t do it too big,” Jane says.
Working with the design constraints of AByJane requires a different way of thinking, so Jane would work on the two labels on different days. “I’m a creative person,” she says. “I have so many ideas that I need to get out there. That’s why I can manage two brands.”
Jane’s design process starts with a drawing, followed by discussions with her staff on how to make the outfit. They might experiment; play around with draping and layering, until the finished piece looks exactly like how she imagined it to be.
She doesn’t see her lack of proper fashion and design training as a disadvantage, not with a good team of designers who understand her ideas. It’s the same with being a composer, she explains.
A composer for an orchestra doesn’t need to know how to play a saxophone or violin. Jane says she doesn’t and she doesn’t need to. What’s required of her is to understand the exact sound that each instrument can make, and write the notes for someone else to play.
“Simon Porte Jacquemus of Jacquemus is a self-taught designer and Joseph Delpozo from Delpozo is trained as an architect. Just like how I can imagine a sound, I can imagine the outfit. I know what needs to be done to make that outfit even though I don’t know exactly how to do it.”
But Jane is not totally clueless at the nitty gritty of garment-making. Her late mother was a tailor back when she was growing up in Alor Setar. She shared her sewing space with the hardware store that Jane’s dad operated, and taught classes as well.
“That is the connection that I had with making clothes,” says Jane.
Her siblings protested at how she’s not using her musical training but the real lesson that she brought from Germany is the knowledge of art and music and how to be creative, turning her into the person that she is now.