Do it Yourself

In the March 2009 edition of ELLE magazine, four alternative covers were featured, each designed by a different designer. Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Christopher Kane and Stella McCartney all designed covers to celebrate the 25th anniversary for London Fashion Week. Each design in unique, each reflecting its designer. The designs are very inspiring, each with their own individual style, something I wish to achieve throughout my career as a designer that I will be able to display within all aspects of my work.

The first was designed by Vivienne Westwood, who when asked about the inspiration for her design suggested "In these hard times - Dress up. Do it Yourself!".

This cover was designed by John Galliano and supports British fashion. Galliano was quoted "Rule Britannia and long live British fashion! Here's to 25 years of London Fashion week, 25 years of Galliano and 25 years of changing the way we look! Here anything is possible, anything goes. Be bold, be fearless - be a true Brit!".

Christopher Kane used Polaroids taken before his S/S 2009 fashion show, which symbolised the end of the design process, captured the memories of show nerves and the transformation for the clothes.

Stella McCartney used her Comic Relief t-shirt designs as a basis for her cover. This cover not only raises awareness of Comic Relief and Red Nose Day but also shows fashion and its role and strength in ending poverty. The t-shirts provided jobs in Africa and were organic and Fairtrade.

All images are taken from my camera, and are of ELLE 2009.

Design Development

Below is a selection of some work from a Design Development project. This was the first time I'd really attempted to draw fashion illustrations and to create fully readable flat drawings of a final capsule collection. As a reminder, at the beginning of term the class was put into groups and researched into a designer's brand, customer, and style and researched into trends. Our designer was Martin Margiela. Once the research element was complete we then designed individually. First I am showing four pages of design development where I work through each garment, altering style features developing them to make a collection that will work together but also a range of garment styles within this. I started my design process by writing a list of the areas I wanted to design in and what percentage these would take up in my design development.


I started with jacket shapes and styles, looking at past examples in collections and thinking about how they could be structured.


I then looked at trousers and shirts, creating a formal aspect in my designs, but there were also casual jersey items, leather jackets and trousers.


Below are two flat boards. I scanned in my design development flats of the ones i was using in my capsule collection and traced over them in illustrator. I tried to make them as clear as possible and easy to read.


I stuck squares of fabric samples to the board displaying not only the fabric that would make up each design, but also the colour.


My illustration pages were next drawn up. I'd practiced some styles of figures in my development and practiced drawing on my garments. I then tried different ways to color them and chose this style.
I used this background and layout as Margiela is known for his simplistic style, as you can see from his website.

Images are of my own work.

Homemade

This year, my boyfriend and I live in a flat in an old Gothic building. With period features including archways, large beautifully designed windows and high ceilings, it was hard not to fall in love with the place. After living here for a few weeks we found that because our bedroom window was quite big and the curtains provided were rather thin, quite a lot of light was let into our room sometimes making it difficult to sleep. The solution to this was to get new curtains.

New, thick curtains made to the size of our window, however, was looking to be quite expensive, which is something us students don't like. So an idea was born, why not make our own curtains? We ventured into Samuel Taylor's, a fabric shop in Leeds city centre, to see what fabrics we could use. We got a few metres of thick red cotton, to match some drapes over the bed; curtain blackout and some white cotton to line them. This is total came to £44, which was half the price of some of the curtains we'd seen (to be honest we bought too much fabric but it might come in handy in future!).

Over the next few evenings we began planning the final look of the curtains including how long they'd need to be and how we'd hang them on the rail. We cut out all the layers for each curtain, with seam and hem allowances and I got to work on my sewing machine. First i stitched the blackout to the lining to hold it in place, then I stitched the main red cotton to this, concealing all raw edges. A top edge was then added to the curtains, which is where some tabs are concealed so that the pole can be slotted through them and be hidden behind the curtain. This also meant that no light could come through above, below or around the curtains. It was a long process, mainly because I'm a perfectionist and wanted a professional finish, but it was really worth it! The curtains add a personal touch to our flat, making it feel even more homely than before.

Images from my camera