The Darkest Night: deus ex machina

Anthony Offiah’s 2025 Collection

The Darkest Night embraces the pejorative themes purported to be antithetical to the concept of Heaven and good virtue. The invisible hand that guides fate, also known as God, is the anchor to the game of life we live. Each garment is a snapshot as the viewer is thrust from their world into the scenes of another, where a protagonist faces apparitions embodying the corporeal forms of their fear and misfortune. The looks will fall into categories of either the apparitions or the protagonist, showcasing the torment they’ve weathered progressively against their former purity. The final look is that synergy is born out of acceptance in this fictional world where God, deus ex machina, is omnipotent. The protagonist will learn that benevolence and omnipotence cannot coexist and that predestination is as much of a comfort as it is a horror. TDN uses the steering force of RPGs as a method of understanding destiny as an impartial, uncontrollable force in its many shades of grey and ambiguity, anthropomorphizing the concept of Deus ex machina. The collection references the gothic and moody Bloodborne game that portrays a never-ending nightmare RPG with love-craven creatures that are abstractions of the psyche, similar to this collection. My artistic process began with me reviewing very old work I had done before I could sew. It was important that this collection be my opus as a designer and meaningfully incorporate the things I loved when I first started sketching and ideating. Something I found was a dark, moody feel, reminiscent of Alexander McQueen, an idol of mine. Creating a custom scent at Olfactory also helped me with ideating by putting me in a woeful mood. My collections all fall under the name Heaven Concealed. I came up with the name many years ago, and it represents my aversion to hegemony and religious abstractions that are the foundation for rules that define and restrict my life and work as a peculiar person and artist. I wanted to fall back on that message with a story equally as provocative. I found myself visiting galleries and researching modern art with gruesome undertones. A favorite of mine is The Clinic of Dr. Gross by Thomas Eakins. In addition to my visual research, I wanted to become a “paragon of darkness”. My personal style and image have always been a manicured version of an approachable, typical student. When developing TDN, I decided that my expression would need to completely envelop me and be a proponent of my identity instead of through experimentation. I decorated my body with tattoos revolving around my artistic processes to signal a coronation as Anthony the artist first, student second. An art professor of mine told me my freshman year that I had a strong, messy, and frenetic artist's hand, something I had already known. However, she encouraged me to lean into it and embrace how unique my passionate fervor manifests in design. My display of gaudy, sharp, poignant energies is a marker of my artistic identity. I am an anarchistic designer bequeathed to scared entropy.

Thalassophobia
World of Wearable Arts 2025 Submission

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