Madeline Walker-Moffitt

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong .

Hark! Now I hear them- ding-dong, bell.

Hi, I’m Maddie and I’m a Foundation student on the Fashion & Textiles course. This skirt was inspired by the poem ‘Full Fathom Five’, from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

The poem describes a man who has been drowned at the bottom of the ocean; as opposed to the gory depiction of drowning you may expect, this poem has a very lovely, magical and melancholy atmosphere. Yes, a man has died but instead of becoming something horrible, his body has become ‘rich and strange’, and he is now a thing of beauty, made from coral and pearls. I was also interested in depicting the element of magic in this poem. The most obvious theme of the supernatural comes in the form of sea-nymphs, but I was also interested in the more subtle magic- we know that skeletons can be preserved for years underwater, and yet this man’s corpse has become one with the ocean in a very short span of time. This is unnatural, suggesting some unearthly force is at work.

My skirt is made up of three layers: a top layer based upon the ocean, a silk painted layer based upon coral (linking to the second line of the poem) and an underskirt with organdie sewn to the base (to suggest sea foam). When making top layer, to get a ‘watery’ effect, I marbled the fabric  then embellished it with hand embroidered sea anemones, pearls (linking to the third line of the poem), felting (like sea foam) and Shisha mirrors (to suggest reflected light on the surface of water).

Unlike the skirt, I did not make the shirt from scratch, but I did dye and embellish it. This is because in my project brief, I did not plan to make a shirt, so made my skirt design far too complicated to have time to make a shirt from scratch as well. I have dyed it green,  silk painted a gradient of darker green on it to compliment the blue of the skirt and embellished it with embroidered sea anemones and pearls.

My photoshoot focused upon capturing the beautiful, sinister atmosphere of the poem. I modelled the outfit myself, and I tried to give the idea of a ‘sea nymph’ in my hair and makeup, like the last section of the poem. I wore my hair loose (it is naturally curly and very ‘fluffy’, so it looked like it was fanned out underwater) and I used face paint to make purplish hollows under my eyes, blue greens at my temples and stuck pearls on to my lips, cheekbones and collarbones to suggest I had been underneath the water for a very long time.

My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madeline_walkermoffitt.art/