My name is Sofiya Demeshkina, I’m a fashion researcher, but my job is similar to that of a translator. I translate fashion into words and analysis, and return the result to a visual form: into a zine, an article, a visual series, a lecture material, or a finished study. To do this, I break down the topic into sources, find a system in them, and assemble it into a product that can be read, shown, and taught.

I look at The Matrix as a media ecosystem with its own signs, media, and ways to influence the viewer.The body of media sources shows repetitive features (guide monitors, mirrors, code reading, books, bullet-time), which helps to see the visual matrix.Screens work as doors between realities, mirrors as a metaphor for illusion, and the viewer becomes an accomplice. The findings were tested in fashion design: a bag, five male images and one female.The research emerges as a ready-made basis for a visual series, a zine, or a module on how cinema shapes fashion.

In the study, I read the hero’s costume and body as a cultural text through fashion theory.12 films are being considered, from Mad Max to The Andromeda Strain, where the costume shows not only survival strategies, but also the reflection of reality by the characters, which helps to assemble an analytical matrix.The apocalypse in the cinema is designed as a visual system. His images are associated with environmental, technological and social crises, and cinema shows what society is afraid of.This is a ready-made lecture material that can become a research module or an article about the culture of dystopia.

In creative fashion research, storytelling sets the frame, and design becomes the answer to a research question. The basis for the fashion project was the concept of the «Blind Man’s Ball» — the ball of the absurd will continue until a Blind Man sees the dawn.Storytelling provides the basis, and research shows which principle of Dadaism is embodied in which solution: from the idea to the print and cut. This research design project uses storytelling to show the way from idea to thing.

A full-fledged study of the history of the Yves Saint Laurent brand helps to decompose the brand into layers and assemble it back into the system.Textures, prints, shapes, cut, color, displays, campaigns, shooting, packaging — it’s all collected in a code map.The map shows which elements create recognition and how they relate to each other, whether it’s silhouette, fabric, or mood. A brand is read as a system, not as a set of individual techniques.The experience of conducting DNA research for a brand makes it possible to continue working in this direction, and the study itself can be used as a case study for a brand analysis course.