Take Your Artist to Work: Andrea Zittel

I am a HUGE fan of the artist Andrea Zittel, whose work centers on functionality of life.  I discovered her about 3 years ago while perusing the art section at Barnes & Noble and was instantly hooked on her Things I Know For Sure series.  After further investigation, I discovered how her art is literally an exploration of how we function and live and how to do this “better” or more efficiently.  Since I am a BIG explorer of the function and living sector, I actually have to be very careful with how much I look at her work.  I get too dizzy and excited with ideas!

One of her earliest “pieces” was creating a uniform she could wear every day.  At the time she was working at an office in an art gallery and couldn’t really afford a slew of professional or nice outfits to wear five days a week (sound familiar?).  In classic Zittel form she started to question the need we have for a new outfit every day.  She reasoned that as someone who didn’t have a lot of money, she really could only afford one really GREAT outfit–so why not create one to wear every day for six months?

Each “uniform” she has made is based on functionality, style, her current interests, and lifestyle.  She has gone on to explore this notion of uniforms and to make different uniforms out of different mediums.  As you can see from the photo above, she was very serious about the style.  I would personally LOVE to wear one of her crocheted uniforms.

I am VERY drawn to this philosophy of fashion and functionality and her assertion that when you are wearing your uniform it can free you up to do more things because you are not wasting time choosing and thinking about what you wear.  I’m actually planning on creating my own uniform of sorts when I get closer to my pre-pregnancy weight.

More on the uniform idea:

More stuff on Andrea Zittel’s uniforms.

Keri Smith has a great post on this.

A young woman wore the same dress for a year as both a practice and a way to raise money for charity.