A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Anke Loh.

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Anke Loh

Professor

Contact

Bio

Professor, Fashion. Education: BFA, 1998, MFA, 1999, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Collection Sold In: Style, Brussels; IT, Hong Kong; Robin Richman, Chicago. Costume Design: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker; Exhibitions: Fashion Museum Hasselt; Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo; Chicago Cultural Center; Centre Pompidou, Paris. Lectures: Smart Fabrics Conference, London; London College of Fashion; International Conference of the Korean Society of Costume, Seoul; Hongik University, Seoul. Fellowship: Research Centre for Fashion, Body and Material Cultures, University of the Arts London. Bibliography: Functional Aesthetics: Visions in Fashionable Technology; Fashion Theory; Kwintessen; I.D.; New York Times; Antwerp Fashion 6+.

Personal Statement

Anke Loh (she/her) is a designer, artist and educator who works at the intersection of fashion, art and technology. With a focus on textile development and wearable tech, her collaborative practice explores potential ways to build community through craft and making. In the process of creating installations and site-specific interventions, Loh regularly invites scientists, designers, artists, and community members to collaborate on innovative projects, like her touch-sensitive embroidered textiles that can elicit pre-recorded soundscapes and imagery. Her practice explores the inherent meaning and symbolism embedded into everyday materials, for example, wire, used not only for building fences, yet also serving as a conduit for communication across borders of all kinds.

Loh has integrated her multidisciplinary approach to art and design throughout her academic career at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is a Professor in the Fashion Design Department. Her work has attracted international media attention and recognition in addition to awards, including the Laureate at the Festival International des Arts et de la Môde in Hyères, France. Her work has been featured at New York’s Fashion Week, Paris’ Centre Pompidou, Japan’s Osaka Collection Show, and Mode Expo Antwerp, Belgium.

Portfolio

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Fashion Design I builds the skills and talents required to achieve creative fashion. This class teaches the design fundamentals of the integrated core fashion design curriculum. Students will engage multiple skills to create individual, visionary, unconventional garments, and later, collections. Through a series of projects, students explore form, silhouette, volume, and research in design to arrive at a personal point-of-view in fashion. This course will specifically ask students to work conceptually and to develop research methodologies in their design work. Based on this inquiry, students generate sketches and surface treatments to refine their unique silhouettes and material manipulations. No prerequisite.

Class Number

1431

Credits

3

Description

Fashion Design I builds the skills and talents required to achieve creative fashion. This class teaches the design fundamentals of the integrated core fashion design curriculum. Students will engage multiple skills to create individual, visionary, unconventional garments, and later, collections. Through a series of projects, students explore form, silhouette, volume, and research in design to arrive at a personal point-of-view in fashion. This course will specifically ask students to work conceptually and to develop research methodologies in their design work. Based on this inquiry, students generate sketches and surface treatments to refine their unique silhouettes and material manipulations. No prerequisite.

Class Number

1432

Credits

3

Description

Fashion Design II is the second part of a two-semester course building the skills and talents required to achieve creative fashion. Taken together with fashion construction II the class becomes a co-taught immersive laboratory. Here students combine design research, shape development, and creative explorations built on and with the foundations into conceptual garments that are fitted on models in both muslin and fabric. Co-req FASH2003; Pre-req FASH2001, FASH2002

Class Number

2209

Credits

3

Description

Students develop conceptual and experimental research for innovative approaches in fashion design, as well as their skill set. They develop fashion figures, study proportions and flats, and engage research and development for shapes, details, silhouettes, and groupings. Cloth is studied as a medium; its structural characteristics and the potential for experimentation as it applies to design is investigated. Visualizing their research through journals, sketching, and collages students foster a personal direction and aesthetic in their design approach. These original concepts are translated to clothing through color story, shape, silhouette, and details, and designed into fashion collections.

Class Number

1983

Credits

3

Description

Supported by lectures on career planning students refine and finalize their critical written materials into a comprehensive support of their personal design vision. Developing a frame of reference theoretically anchors and positions the graduate's final presentation.

Class Number

1951

Credits

3