After a 2-year hiatus, the IIDA NE Fashion Show finally returned to Boston! The design community once again gathered to create original garments interpreting this year’s theme: EMERGE.
Led by our Interior Design group and partnered with MDC Interior Solutions, Momentum Textiles and Wallcovering and Sherwin Williams, our PAYETTE team brought our own earthly delights to the runway, taking inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch’s oil painted triptych.
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch
We are excited to share that our entry received the Flying Colors award, which is given to the entry that best showcases a variety of colors in a compelling way. Our costumes were constructed from wallpaper and acoustical PET material from MDC Interior Solutions, various types of fabrics from Momentum Textiles and Wallcovering, and paint, spackle and other interior finishes from Sherwin Williams.
We wanted to treat our entry as “wearable art” with a “the more you look, the more you see” approach. We were inspired by Bosch’s painting because there is so much to discover. Every time you look at it, something new emerges, and this is what we were trying to capture with our entry.
The original painting depicts a wide variety of people and body parts, which we wanted to capture in a “safe for work” kind of way while also ignoring the underlying theme behind the original painting. We also wanted our entry to be far more “diverse” than the original painting.
We loved capturing the randomness of the piece and hiding “delights” in the costumes that became clear the closer you looked, such as the “butterflies” in the head pieces that were actually hands created from acoustical materials made to look like butterflies. Another detail that emerged upon closer inspection was the hand painted imagery on the wallpaper. This imagery included whimsical and strange things such as hands and feet growing out of plants, eyeball plants and faces in flowers.
The collars and cuffs on one of the costumes was also made up of hands carved from acoustical PET. We also sculpted animals out of Sherwin Williams spackle and planted them in the headpieces. Our motto was “the weirder the better!” Our imagination stretched to the shoes as well, which we used Sherwin Williams spackle to create a mouth with a tongue sticking out for one pair of shoes, and the other pair looked like human feet.
Overall, we had an incredible amount of fun with our interpretation of this year’s fashion show theme, and it was truly reflected in our entry!
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We are honored to share PAYETTE has received two 2026 Green Good Design Awards from The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies—Land’s Sake Farm and The Ragon Institute of Mass General, MIT, and Harvard.
“Green GOOD DESIGN identifies and emphasizes the world’s most important examples of sustainable design and works to develop a public awareness program that informs the general public about which global companies are doing the best job in ecological and sustainable design for our world. Architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning projects, as well as product, packaging, and graphic design projects from over 30 nations were honored with the 2026 Green GOOD DESIGN Award.”
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