I was not too sure what to expect by walking into the classroom for my presentation today, as it's very clear to me that the students do things quite differently here. When you are used to doing things one way, it's a rather awkward feeling when you bring work that is totally different to anyone else's. Lucky for me, I didn't go first this time. During the past couple of weeks I have ben asking to look at other peoples' work, just to get some sort of rough idea of what kind of presentation is expected of me. I am used to portraying my ideas through materials, fabrics and imagery alone. Taking inspirations from various areas of design, almost everything but fashion. Here, they seem to like writing. For me this is difficult because I believe if you need to explain your ideas and thoughts then you haven't done very good research. But hey, I gave it a shot anyway, so this explains why this work is so different to things I would normally produce back home.
Then the poem that I remember from when I was younger, this inspired my design process, I thought, how could I take elements of this poem and turn them into a garment, by thinking of this it drew me on to other ideas,
Then I started on my mood boards and collecting images that I can use for inspiration. I would say that they are fairly self explanatory.
After my mood boards, I started to look and May queen inspired fashion, viewing some items by Dolce&Gabanna, and some fashion photography.
Then I remembered the Edinburgh Fire Festival, and how they feature several may queens in the display each year. I decided this was very relevant to my project and I loved the embroidery on the garments and the way the embroidered flowers only run along the bottom of the dresses, keeping the may queen in a way still traditional in the sense she is wearing mostly pale white. This then lead me onto the idea of maybe not hand embroidering the whole dress, maybe just the bottom, putting a modern twist on the traditional dress.
And now the 8 'looks' that I had to design for the 'May Queen' collection. I don't think I have ever used such an awful mix of colours for designing before, but hey, it fits what I want it to do, so that's all that matters. This is another that I have noticed, I do things totally different, where I draw all of my illustrations myself, on the computer using various software packages, the students over here, they just take an image from a catwalk show of a model, they then draw the garment on over the top. But I really don't like this way of doing illustrations, it feels like cheating, but not in a good way either, they look like an obviously drawn on item, so really, you may as well draw the whole thing. I don't understand why not.
This was my technical drawing of my final garment. As you can see, I have changed my idea quite a lot throughout the project, I did try to do the PVC basket weave over the top of the garment, but due to lack of resources out here, and substandard machinery, I couldn't stitch the PVC together. I had to make a quick change of mind. no I knew that I wanted to use the PVC, I had to because it was the whole idea of using a modern material to represent a traditional technique. I made the decision to cut the PVC into really tiny strips getting larger at the ends and cut into shapes that represent leaves. and use the strips to make straps and shoulder decorations, and I have to say, I am very glad that I was forced to change my idea, because in hindsight, the PVC covering the entire white dress, would have been too much, and all I wanted it for was the representation of a thought.
Then came my embroidery research. I had to look at ways I could make this really beautiful but with as little time taken as possible, having done hand embroidery for many years, I know just how long certain things can take, and realistically, I am working to a very tight deadline here.
Then I was actively trying out a few techniques, one that I have done many times before, it involves painting around the embroidery and making a smaller amount of work look much bigger, and I needed this because I was running out of time.
These are the photographs from the photoshoot that I did, ok, they were fairly rubbish, but it was my intention to alter them so much that it really didn't matter about the background more about the light direction
