Student-led fashion show highlights intersection between art and mental illness

On Thursday evening, silence fell in the audience of students, friends and family inside the Innovate Carolina Junction on Rosemary Street. Models and their designers walked down the stairs inside the building, showcasing original clothing designs. 

For this event, titled "Threads of the Mind," Art and the Brain partnered with Coulture Magazine and several local up-and-coming designers to showcase mental health disorders through fashion, illustrating that these issues can be multi-faceted. 

Mental health awareness is a mission that Art and the Brain continues to make a priority for college students.

The club, led by UNC students Shreeya Yarlagadda, president, and Maren Molinaro, vice president, is an independent organization funded by Innovate Carolina. Their goal is to foster creative innovative interdisciplinary conversations and destigmatize brain disorders.

“When I first started my freshman year, I was really into intersectionality between art and psychology,” Molinaro said. “That's what I did. I was an artist, and there wasn't really much of that.” 

Since its beginning, Art and the Brain has hosted various events to showcase this intersection, including this showcase.

Following a film screening they hosted that presented an artist’s film depicting an individual's experience with Alzheimer's, Yarlagadda and Molinaro were inspired to create another experience where individuals could understand more mental health disorders through a visual art medium.

“I think representing them in different ways expands our perception of them and deepens our understanding while also destigmatizing it and making it much more open to conversation, asking new questions and just moving beyond what we already know,” Yarlagadda said.

With this idea in mind, Yarlagadda and Molinaro reached out to Coulture editor-in-chiefs Sophia Katz and Alexandra Sanchez-Maldonado to make it happen.

Thursday’s event was both a showcase for designers to display their art, as well as an interactive event for spectators to talk with models and designers to understand their work.

Ava Mayo, junior at UNC and style editor at Coulture Magazine, designed a dress for the event to depict obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Inspired by OCD through religious fixations and a friend who had the disorder, Mayo created a skirt made of pages of the Bible — shaped to reflect the grooves of a brain — draped in a white veil meant to illustrate the way thoughts cloud one’s interpretations. Through her creation, she brought a different understanding to the disorder.

“I wanted to do [a condition] that’s more widely misunderstood, and I felt like the history was really compelling,” she said.

The concept was not just compelling to Mayo, either.

UNC students Skyla Love and Evan Wilker originally attended the show to support their friend, who was a designer, but ended up exploring various designs and learning a lot about different mental health conditions.

“I’m really interested in psychopathology and breaking the mental health stigma, so just the idea was really interesting and fascinating to me,” Love said.

With an interactive format and full commitment from everyone involved, the showcase illustrated that mental health is not a linear topic but something with several levels.

“Our only note was ‘Go all out,’ and think of this as art more than fashion, and I think they really did that,” Katz said. “All their pieces are so unique and represent their topic, and it just went beautifully.”

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