Final Paper - Confronting Social Anxiety with Lexy Ho Tai

Erin Pienta

Public Narrative

Our overall group mission was to addresses the theme of fear people interacting and social anxiety. We wanted to use performance to confront these issues.

            Fellow senior at Parsons, Lexy Ho-Tai, is doing her senior BFA fashion design thesis on the way people interact through the garments they put on their bodies. In addition to the final product having a message about communication, she wants the process of creating the fabric for the project to have a community aspect. In working with Lexy, we came up with the idea for her to create her fabrics in a series of public parks. She wants to use public to create her fabric through weaving, dyeing, and other small experiments all done via public interaction. I want to help her execute this by helping her set up a day, time, and place in these parks where she can not only interact with the community, but the community can interact with each other. So many people now are terrified to step away from their smartphones and simply talk to one another. No one is willing to have a conversation without the use of emojiis. As Lexy says to me all the time “what ever happened to a real genuine smile?”

            By forcing people to actually use their hands, people will have to put away their personal technology and instead actively engage in what they are doing. Once the phones are down, it is her hope that people will begin to interact with one another, focus on what their doing, have fun, and actually talk to one another.

            Lexy was selected for this because she is so thoroughly engrossed in the concept. Since she began studying fashion at Parsons, Lexy has long rejected social norms for fashion and began pushing the boundaries for gender, social issues, and sustainability.

            The list of parks that Lexy is going to participate in is Washington Square Park in the Village, Tompkins Square Park in Alphabet City, the Imagination Playground at South Street Seaport, the Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, and the De Witt Clinton Park in Hells Kitchen. I personally chose these parks for Lexy to help give her a diverse view of Manhattan. I wanted her to potentially interact with a wide range of people, while still making sure she would be in parks where people would actually be. For each of these parks, because they are controlled by the Parks Department, Lexy simply needs to apply for a special events permit for each of the events. Since these are small events, there should be no additional fee from the city beyond the $25 for each park.

            As far as timeline goes, each of these events will take place as follows, beginning in Washington Square Park on Saturday January 15. For the next four weeks, on Saturday, Lexy will move from park to park, interacting with different people and continue to make her textiles for her collection.        

In order to gain attention for the upcoming event, we are going to place event fliers around Washington Square Park first, and use Lexy’s existing fan base to gain attention on Facebook and instagram. It is our hope that the Washington Square event will help draw others to the other parks. We are also going to create Facebook events to help remind people about the event. In this day and age of technology, a facebook notification is often the fastest way to reach people.

In order to incorporate social media, yet not have it be a disruptive action during the actual process, a photographer will be involved but unseen during the process. The photographer will capture moments of the making-taking place, and later post them on the tumblr of the ongoing event. This will help generate an interest for the people involved but also garner following post haste. When people see the photos of the event after the fact, they will be more likely to come to the event and join in on the fun.

            The initial cost of the event, before beginning, is $125. This is a nonrefundable cost from the Parks Department. However, beyond this, and the beauty of Lexy’s work, is that there should be very minimal costs beyond this. The base of Lexy’s work is on sustainability. Instead of using organic material like most modern day designers do, she takes it full throttle and uses 100% recycled or found materials. During the summer, before I began collaborating with her, she did a mass collection amongst friends and dumpster diving digs for her base fabrics and materials. Beyond there, costs are minimal. For a an extremely safe estimate, I would add in $100 for paint, $200 for sculpey (a molding material Lexy is particularly fond of), and $100 for jello (Lexy is particularly found of dyeing materials using Jello, which should be particularly interesting for the additional smell factor this contributes to the scene).

            This social experiment will help ultimately add another layer of meaning into Lexy’s already complex and ever morphing thesis.