Printmaking Meets Pants

2010 shows no sign of dissipating the popular appeal currently enjoyed by printmaking, with starter kits still on sale at Urban Outfitters and lines forming into the street to join courses and workshops. We’re happy to reap the benefits of all this extra attention, but it does seem to have brought some interesting thoughts into the art world. But what about when it’s less clear where printmaking ends and commercial process begins?

I’m really fascinated by the 2010 Winter Olympics uniform for the American snowboarding team. Sure, it’s old news by now, but what I wouldn’t give to get a little access to a studio that could pull off this kind of work. Think of the possibilities! You can learn a little more by checking out the NPR story on the pants.

If you’re not in the know, the above “denim” is actually a sublimation print on Gore-Tex fabric. The firm which made them took a series of photographs of an actual pair of weathered jeans and translated those photographs into a pattern that was then printed on the raw material.

It looks like you too can wear a print, now that the pants are available for $250 a pair! But if the print looks as real as the real thing, what’s the point? Printmaking is no stranger to bringing up questions of authenticity (“Is it truly original? Or is it a copy?”), so I guess there’s a little further study needed…

It’s a CMYK world; we just live in it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 18th, 2010 at 9:51 pm and is filed under News and tagged with pants, rant, snowboarding, sublimation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.