Rotations: Fashion & Textiles

In my second week I had fashion and textiles, this was the workshop that I was least looking forward to, although at the end of the week I found that I managed to take a lot away from it. On the first day we started by doing a sketch of our denim jackets in their original state. After this we had to pick a street style e.g Gothic, hippie, skater etc. After choosing a hippie as a street style, I cut my jacket in half and started attaching it alongside my partners on our manikin. This created a really interesting look although it did look quite strange and was difficult to match the way our jackets looked to our chosen street style. After sketching this weird collision of jackets down we then created several variations using our jackets and then sketched them down. Once we had done this we had to pick 4 different words that described our jacket and if the four word didn't match what our jacket looked like we had to alter it to match. Our four words were Edgy, restrictive, unique and striking. However after picking our four word they didn't really fit into the hippie street style so we moved into more Gothic. This in turn also made us make some drastic changes to our jacket.
In the afternoon I attempted doing fashion illustrations using felt tip and cut out images from magazines. I also tried to incorporate my jacket design into the fashion illustration. This worked really well as trying to fit my jacket into a picture from a magazine made the drawing look incredibly out of proportion, but in a really odd way it made the drawing have a powerful effect.
On the second day of fashion we concentrated on making samples out of any spare denim or other materials we had left. I took this as a prime opportunity to learn how to knit. This did take a while to get the hang of and at the end of it what I had made just looked like a tangled ball of wool although I felt that the idea was still there. After moving on from knitting I started weaving strips of denim which created a really intricate and and impressive effect although the design itself was actually really simple. For my last sample I just randomly splashed red food colouring over a piece of denim which actually made it look like it was blood stained. Once we had completed making our samples we drew quick sketches of each one. Which given the short amount of time we had made our drawings look like they had a lot of movement.
After lunch we spent the afternoon making final adjustments to our jackets taking inspiration from our sample designs. I did this by bleaching a checkered design into the arm and body of one half of my jacket. This worked to a certain point although I found when I removed the masking tape from the denim that I had been a little generous with the bleach as a fair bit had managed to get under the masking tape in turn loosing some of the checkered effect. Once the bleach had dried I reconnected my half of the jacket with my partners and then we made final adjustments to it such as connecting the arm and fashioning a new collar out of spare denim to make it wearable for the pictures we had to take the next day.
On the final day of fashion workshop we started off by concentrating on fashion illustrations. The first one we had to draw was drawn with bleach this was difficult at first although my main concern was trying to keep it off my clothes. But by the second drawing I had gotten over the worry of getting it on my clothes and my drawings became a lot more flowing. Now after creating a basic outline using bleach I started working chalk and charcoal over my drawing to highlight depth and where the light hits the jacket. This really started to make the illustration look three dimensional. After we finished using the bleach we started to use watered down blue paint. And used the back of wallpaper samples to paint on which created an elongated drawing which looked incredibly interesting because of where the paint ran, and the erratic brushstrokes.

In the final part of the day we had to use our jackets in a fashion shoot. We had to take everything into consideration such as make up, hair, location and lighting. I had a lot of strong ideas and a good willing model lined up although my partner was difficult to negotiate with so most ideas I had weren't put into practice and we were left with an out of place model who didn't fit our street style and poses that did not highlight our jacket or the style it was meant to express. So we were left with some very weak shots that didn't sum up the progress throughout the week.