Green Lee

Green is a South Korean fashion designer based in London and Seoul.

She specializes in designing art-wear for women. 

After studying Textile art and fashion design at Hongik University in Seoul, she came to London in 2021 to pursue a postgraduate degree at Royal College of Art. Exploring her inner world, Green believes that the repetitive act of handcrafting is a way of connecting herself to the outside world, a form of self-medication to understand herself and calm her swirling, unstable inner world. Her journey through RCA has been a process of showing, expressing, and expanding on the tensions that exist between the world and her own inner world through art. By consistently working with acrylic and metal, she is creating her own unique body of work that shapes her identity with each project. 

 Is eye to eye contact really threatening and avoided in social anxiety?

Direct gaze may be a fear- relevant feature for socially anxious individuals in social interaction.

_ ‘An eye- tracking and psychophysiology study’_ Matthias J. Wieser

This project aims to protect me from personal anxiety. The theme and process of my work is very personal. I tried to simultaneously express and embody in the clothes a soft, delicate, fragile inner world and an outer space that sometimes feels aggressive. For me, the outside world is everyone else but me. I have an anxiety disorder, so sometimes I feel anxious when I look at other people's eyes and facial expressions. It can be a stare, or it can be just eyes.

What started as eyewear with mosaic lenses and sharp, aggressive shapes to protect me from the gaze of others later developed into the armor of my graduation collection. I believe that my armor can hide and protect me from others, and can even be a weapon. Inspired by the Japanese anime "Parasite" and insect-eating flowers that are normally quiet but become aggressive to protect themselves out of sheer instinct when threatened by external factors, I developed the tentacles of the parasite and the stamens and thorns of the flower to create the pieces that make up the armor. In addition, I captured my habitual defensive behaviors and expressed them in silhouette. While working with acrylic and metal, which are the main materials of my work, I also used jewelry and metal techniques such as sandblasting to enhance the quality.

The process of getting to know and studying the parts of myself that I used to ignore and hide was overwhelming and difficult at times, but over time, I realized it was a journey of understanding and acceptance. The journey of exploring these materials will continue after graduation, and she hopes to collaborate with various fields.