Ahead of Bacchanal, Fox&Badge invites for our costume-making night where we’ll be exploring Dionysian adornment: creating pieces that blur the boundaries between costume, jewellery, rope work and the living body.

Guided by Anna Kii of Figure of A, we’ll combine the deliberate geometry of Japanese Shibari with the unruly abundance of the natural world. Rope will twist into vines. Metal hardware will become jewellery. Ivy, leaves and flowers will climb across bodies.

Rather than making something for the body and putting it on afterwards, many of our pieces will be constructed directly on the person wearing them - responding to their individual shape and becoming entirely unique in the process.

Structured and wild. Bound and overflowing. Human and vegetal.

Very Dionysian.

WHAT WE’LL BE MAKING

Choose your own creation and take it as far as you like:

• Ivy-twined crowns and headpieces
• Rope necklaces, collars and body jewellery
• Decorative Shibari-inspired harnesses
• Organic rope and wire structures sculpted directly onto the body
• Wearable pieces incorporating leaves, flowers, ivy and found natural materials

Everything we create will be unisex and individual to its wearer, with techniques you can continue experimenting with for your Bacchanal costume.

No rope experience or craft experience is needed.

WE PROVIDE

• High-quality rope
• Metal rings, clips and signature Figure of A hardware
• Wire and construction materials
• Ivy, foliage, flowers and natural elements
• Tools
• Guidance on tying, construction and composition
• Inspiration from Dionysian imagery and Ancient Greek adornment
• Support for complete beginners as well as experienced makers

WHAT TO BRING

If you have them, bring natural materials, charms, jewellery, ribbons, rope, old costume pieces or strange little objects you’d like to transform.

You may also want to bring some of the clothing you plan to wear to Bacchanal so that your piece can be designed directly around it.

Most importantly: bring your imagination and a willingness to experiment.

A NOTE ON DIONYSIAN ADORNMENT

Dionysus rarely arrives alone.

Around him grow ivy and grapevine. His followers carry the thyrsus, a great staff entwined with vegetation. His world is populated by satyrs, maenads, masks, animals, forests and overflowing cups of wine.

Nature does not simply decorate Dionysus. It seems to overtake him.

And that feels important.

Dionysus repeatedly dissolves the neat borders humans create: between civilisation and wilderness, masculine and feminine, human and animal, restraint and ecstasy, performer and audience, the self we present to the world and the stranger creature underneath.

So for this workshop, we are interested in adornment not simply as decoration, but as transformation.

What happens when ivy begins to creep across the skin? When rope traces and reshapes the architecture of the body? When something deliberately constructed begins to look as though it has grown there?

Perhaps costume can do more than disguise us.

Perhaps, for a night, it can give another part of us permission to emerge.

ABOUT FIGURE OF A

Figure of A is an accessories brand inspired by Japanese rope bondage — Shibari — created by rope artist and fashion designer Anna Kii.

After practising rope bondage for several years, Anna developed the idea of wearable Shibari, bringing together her backgrounds in rope and fashion design. Figure of A translates rope patterns traditionally used around the body into clothing and accessories, allowing rope to become both structural and decorative.

Architectural, body-aware and unapologetically sensual, the pieces move between contemporary fashion and fetishwear. Anna's work seeks to bring Shibari beyond the underground and allow it to be encountered as the aesthetic, sensual and consensual art form that it can be.

All Figure of A pieces are handmade using high-quality materials and custom-made rope.

For this workshop, Anna will take us back to the fundamental material itself — helping us use rope, hardware and the body to build entirely new pieces of wearable art.

ABOUT BACCHANAL

This workshop is part of the journey towards BACCHANAL — Fox&Badge's Feast of Dionysus.

For one night, we descend into the world of the Ancient Greek god of ecstasy, wine, theatre, transformation and divine madness.

Expect an immersive collision of dance, performance, ritual, sensuality, costume and human connection as we explore the tension at the heart of Dionysus: between discipline and abandon, civilisation and wilderness, the individual and the ecstatic crowd.