Interview
Finding her own stroke and dancing her own steps with Elly Azizian.
by Patrick Morgan
Elly Azizian began drawing and delving into the world of Fashion Illustration while working as a designer of ballroom dance costumes and studying Haute Couture at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC.
Her creative journey began in the performing arts as a competitive ballroom dancer, and from their developed into costume design. Haute Couture and the extravagance of fashion felt like a natural extension to my artistic outlet.xIt had all the opulence which I had come to know through ballroom costumes but opened an even wider door to abstraction, layers, and endless expressive outlets – nothing is impossible in the world of high fashion.
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She finds she is at her best creatively at night, so the mornings are usually reserved for logistics, administrative tasks, and draft reviews. Towards the afternoons, Elly warms up, either with the amazing live sketch sessions of Drawing Cabaret Couture and Ami Benton or by working on editorial images that have caught her eye. These warmups are primarily what feed her social media content. Finally, Elly will settle into longer and more plotted drawing sessions, prepping commission or gallery works towards the evenings.
Elly will have different preferences for different projects. For the quicker warmups, She loves a soft pencil, a basic set of pastels, and a bold accent-colour marker for a bit of drama. When working on more detailed pieces or projects, she will plot the image in layers – pastels, coloured pencils, collage elements either from magazines or construction paper, and a final top touch of ink, gouache, gold/metal foil, or even nail polish. Depending on the look she needs, that final top accent layer can get quite unconventional.
Because she started in the performing arts, that has always been my prime inspiration, but it’s expanding over the years beyond multi-disciplinary dance performances to include theatre, live music events, especially on the smaller, more intimate scale, and cabaret/burlesque/variety shows. History has shown how forever intertwined all these disciplines are with fashion - examples ranging from the Ballet Russe’s Bakst and Chanel costumes, to Jazz’s influence on modern dress, and everything in-between. A majority of fashion trends can be traced back and mirrored in performing arts movements.
There’s no shortage of frustrations in the field. Whether it’s the inconsistency of work or the creative barriers you’re bound to hit now and again, She think's the most important thing you can do is train yourself to work through those moments. Pivot directions where possible, seek out fresh inspiration, or sometimes you just need to sit and push through all the bad and binned sketches until you come out the other side. Once through that block, Elly has found there’s always a step up in the level and quality of work. These frustrations, when channeled productively, can become great opportunities.
Because of COVID, she has been greatly missing out on the live performance energy that she would fuel up on for inspiration, so she's been finding ways to create it at home. Elly has been reading a lot of plays; "the works of Sarah Ruhl have stunning and delicate abstractions, the finesse of which I would love to somehow capture in my work. Sartre’s “No Exit” was, aside from a prime existential text, also a fascinating character study and I kept imagining my illustrated versions of the trio."
"Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” has become a bit of a ritual re-read for me; it’s such an unbelievable layering of history, wit, and profound perspectives on the purpose of art, that each read-through feels like diving into a masterfully layered collage. I always walk away from it with an eagerness to see unique possibilities."
Her sketching soundtrack is quite lengthy and diverse in styles. Still, the most recent and frequently played artists would be Black Pumas, The Monkees, Jacob Banks, Olivia Dean, Tom Waits, Melody Gardot, Arctic Monkeys, Tame Impala, and Miles Davis. It’s an odd mix, but it’s been working well.
In terms of her ‘fashions of the moment’, She is a bit too fickle to call out favourite brands or designers, but she does have favourite collections - where everything from the fabrics to the air molecules seems to line up for the perfect presentation and atmosphere. Recently, Valentino’s “Of Grace and Light” was one such collection, as were Ronald van der Kemp’s “Wardrobe 12” and Maison Margiela’s “Co-Ed.” With the upcoming couture presentations in a few weeks, Elly is very eager to see what direction fashion’s most opulent spectrum will take in light of all the world's events and emotions.