Suzie’s World: From Fabrics to Fashion by Baihan Lin

This project is a journey through the original watercolor and gouache design drawings by the legendary and prolific textile designer Suzie Zuzek (1920 - 2011). Between 1962 and 1985, Zuzek created over 1,500 designs for Key West Hand Print Fabrics in Key West, Florida, which were used by Lilly Pulitzer. Via the amazing collections from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. We aim to showcase the common motifs and style evolutions. To bridge between fabrics and fashion, we create an interface to both showcase the textile design as a full size wallpaper to create an immersive experience as well as creating hand-drawn fashion figures that give the audience a sense of how these fabrics feel like on the fashion design. To disentangle the effect ofSuzie Zuzek’s fabrics on the fashion vs. the Lilly Pulitzer fashion style itself, we drew these fashion figures from scratch and varied the styles significantly from the original Lilly Pulitzer brand. We hope the study reveals the nature and scope of Zuzek's artistic contribution to the iconic Pulitzer style.