New Zealand fashion designer, Sophia Hattingh, and I caught up in June last year when she first started thinking of her new eyewear collection. She never mentioned they would push cultural and gender boundaries.
I should have guessed.
As part of her honours degree at AUT University the 21 year old followed the Critical Design movement and created a unique line of glasses to sit alongside mass-produced counterparts. The aim of this line, Reframing, was to spark debate, she says.
And that they did.
The glasses are made with pubic hair.
Photo Credit: Frances Carter
Sophia finished her design degree at AUT in 2013 with a line of overtly sexual, silk, slip dresses. These were impractical to wear but gained her a name in the design world being featured in BLACK Magazine and a top spot on the Rookie runway.
This time around she aimed to work with machinery and hard materials. Originally she pitched the idea of sex toys but this was shut down almost immediately by the university. And so Reframing was born.
Sophia asked her Facebook and Instagram friends and followers for the hairs she needed. With little questioning, these were sent her way, mostly from friends and girls around New Zealand.
“One pair of glasses took over 20 people’s pubic hair,” she says.
To make the glasses Sophia first set the hair into a resin block which was then put through a 3D drill, the CNC machine, which cuts out the designs.
Originally quoted on I-D Vice, she says the controversy is “so strange”.
“It’s like when it’s part of your body it’s fine, but the second hair is removed it becomes this whole other thing. Initially my reason for doing this was because I wanted, in as literal terms as possible, to put the human into the product”.
