Inital experimenting...

As I have been influenced over the summer by natural colours and textures I started to play around with inks creating drawings which were done freely by letting the ink move around the page to create this sense of blasts of colour and explosions of colour. I have also thought about pattern and shape within my original photographs and started thinking about repetition within these. Although I am a knitter I want to start to experiment with print, hand print and perhaps natural dyeing.

Nature and Fashion

Alexander McQueen Spring 2007

John Galliano

 

Jean-Paul Gaultier

Garde of Delights by Steven Meisel | Trendnistan

Bringing the outdoors indoors

The Natural World

Sometimes it is the little things in life that hold so much inspiration and influence to creative thinking. I have always been interested in exploring the natural environment as I find it interesting and exciting, taking in all of it's textures and colours can be overwhelming at times and I love exploring different ways of expressing it.

My work is mainly driven by the natural environment as there are so many ways you can go with it...



The beauty of colour-

 

The beauty of the landscape- 

Evaluation

We started this project as a group of 4. We came up with this idea of sustainability and up cycling. We developed this idea and started thinking about climate change and how the environment is under threat. As our group of 4 was not working out we decided to split into two groups.

Me and Jess pushed this idea of protecting ourselves against this changing climate by focusing on the ideas of rising sea levels and how fashion needs to take different directions with there collects to fight against this changing climate. We thought a lot about making materials waterproof and started thinking about creating some sort of  multifunctional garment, that can be used on an everyday basis, that would protect you from the rain and stop you from getting wet.We also thought about creating something that could change colour, almost like a warning sign, so the darker the colour the more rain was expected. However after consideration we decided to leave this idea behind as it was to technical for us to create and we thought the idea of making it waterproof was more interesting.
We have done a lot of sampling and researching within this project playing around with different materials, attaching and detaching things and have a focused colour palette that runs throughout. This has changed slightly from the start as we wanted to create a more sophisticated palette. We wanted to create something that was relevant for all seasons. In fashion there will always be four seasons, however in reality there isn't really a standard four season anymore. On the high street things that are in the shops are not always suitable for this every changing climate and people find themselves shopping in sales as things come into fashion and go straight to sale. This is becoming a regular thing which proves a change is needed. This is what pushed us in this project, to create something that could be a yearly thing, something that you could wear on an everyday basis.

I feel this project has put me out of my comfort zone as I usually work in a more natural way, however I have enjoyed the challenge and feel I have learnt a lot from Unit X. Working in different ways helped open my eyes to the bigger picture and enabled me to experiment in different ways.  I also feel working in a group is beneficial and have enjoyed it. We have bounced ideas off each other and I feel we have worked well together.

Final Samples

 Here are some of our final sample ideas which have been photographed with water on them to show they are successfully waterproof.

Developing the fashion illustrations for our final trend book we combined the images from our final samples which show our colour palette with our fashion illustrations to show how this would work in a garment.

Final Designs

We like the idea of a hood or collar shape and style, something that will keep you dry and warm but also looking stylish too.

We have thought about colour ways which I feel is shown throughout the project, the natural colours used in the Barbour designs contrasting against the bright and loud colours you find in the simple rain coat. We liked the idea of the bright colours lifting the mood when the weather is miserable.

We have also thought a lot about structure when developing these fashion illustrations.

We did the fashion illustrations using photo shop-

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