Fashion Illustrator Uses Real World As Fabric

Shamekh Bluwi is a visual artist and fashion illustrator based in Amman, Jordan. His Instagram feed is chock-full of gorgeous fashion illustrations, but a recent series of photos is especially cool: They show hand-drawn fashion plates with the “fabric” cut out, held up against different kinds of real-world backgrounds. The scenery revealed by the cut-outs thus essentially becomes the “fabric” of Bluwi’s designs and ranges in form and texture from tile mosaics, to plants, to whole cityscapes. The photos will have you wishing that there were some way you could apply the patterns and images all around you to your own clothes.

In some of the images, Bluwi holds the same dress pattern against different backgrounds; one of my favorite aspects of this series is that it really highlights the importance of both form and pattern in fashion. The basic silhouettes stay the same, but the look and feel of the dresses change dramatically according to their “patterns.” They also show how much perspective matters: One of the images, for example, features a city street peeking through an illustration of a chic sleeveless dress. I think few would describe a traffic-filled road as “beautiful,” but set within the outlines of the dress, it becomes quite pretty. Scroll through to see the images – they’ll have you scanning your own windows for fashion inspiration.

Check out more of Shamekh Bluwi’s work on Instagram.

Image: shamekhbluwi/Instagram