Fashion & Textiles.. Styling

Finally Styling and Promotion week had arrived I was happy as I feel very confident in this area of fashion. 

We was set homework the following Friday to produce a series of at least four polaroid photo's of ourselves to be styled in our own unique way. Mine reflect my current style of minimal colours like greys, blacks and whites plus each photo shows the different sides to my personality.

Our first task of the week was really interesting and a great test of our creativity where we had to style one of peers in our clothes and accessories we had brought in from home and create 3 different looks within 6 minutes I find it was quite like a physical version of the design development session

Throughout the week we was split into groups of 4 and had to do a trend report presentation on what was popular on the runway and would sell well on the high street. For me I was doing vintage so I set off to shoreditch to research and take photos of what was on trend in vintage stores and boutiques.

For my final outcome I had to produce a photoshoot reflecting my personal style. To plan for my shoot I made 6 mood-boards consisting of Hair, Makeup, Location, Models, Styling and Mood.

I decided to make mine in the style of a magazine editorial which was inspired from the street issue of i-D magazine focusing on peoples favourite street in the world with mine being Brick Lane,I liked the idea and knew it would fit well around the theme of identity. 

Fashion & Textiles.. Accessories

Accessories design has really been the most hands on week and I found myself really getting stuck in.

I started off the week developing the design from one of my personal objects from week one which was my statue of liberty pen from New York as the overall project is based around the theme of personality, family background and interests and from that experience of going to New York as kid I took my love of Bazooka Joe Gum and used the wrappers on an old business card box to create a small coin purse which can also be turned into a bag when the chain is attached.

For the final outcome we had to produce a photo-shoot showing the product in it's final element.    

Fashion & Textiles.. Design Development

This week was the start of design development, as a promotions student I knew this would be a hard week as my illustration skills were not the greatest. on the first day I started on design sketches with Sarah these were quick simple design sketches which were done in 5 minute sessions so the pressure was really on for me but after a sessions I managed to find my niche through line drawing and found it helped to get my design ideas across the easiest. Towards the end of the week we had to produce a series of looks for our own collection and present them to the rest of our group.

With our 2nd task we explored designing on the mannequins making shapes out of a silhouette from something we found that was personal to us but at the same time will still make an interesting design. I chose to do the initials of my name (JVH) as its bold, a great print and can make a statement of who I am reflecting in the designs. Once I'd cut out all my silhouettes we did several tasks on the mannequins firstly making three different designs within 3 minutes each I find with more limited time I have my ideas seem to flow a lot faster which is the main basis behind design development, making your ideas flow.

Fashion & Textiles.. iDentity

This week was the first week on my foundation fashion & textiles course at Ravensbourne, On day one the class and I had a little getting to know each other session by asking questions about our personality, family history and likes and dislikes in a speed dating sort of style which was really weird but at the same time very fun and interesting. 

Now it was time for our next task of the day taking pictures of our ten objects that mean have meaning to us and sketching some of them out in our sketchbooks, it was a beautiful sunny day and lovely to sit outside and get to know more people over lunch and with only a few hours left the day was over and we were assigned our first piece of homework.

On Wednesday we brang in our homework which we were set on monday to complete a 3D mindmap of our 10 objects and bring in 10 images to use for a task later in the day, Our task was to create a new mindmap based around our 3D ones and link it our family history, likes & dislikes, and personality I found it quite difficult but really helped learn more about myself as a person.

On Thursday I had a SDS day so i woke up early to complete my homework task set from Wednesday to design a portrait of my face made up from some of my family photos it was interesting trying to blend different shades of paper together as i'm so used to using paints, pencils and pastels when it comes to doing portraits. 

Once I finished my work I had the rest of the day free and was off out to assist stylist Adam Howe on a Menswear feature for the Sunday Times Style. It was a very long but fun day and I got some good styling experience from working with Adam. As much as I enjoy styling, I don't think it's the pathway I want to go down in fashion as it doesn't challenge me as much as other areas such as Design & Textiles but that's why exactly why I'm doing this course to help me discover and further what I want to do.

After what felt like a very long first week Friday had finally arrived where I was experimenting with placing imagery, everyone in my group had to lay out ten images on a A1 sheet and we'd go round and transform someone else's (we repeated this three times) from our point of view of what we thought we're the most interesting and how they should be presented.

Then we went back to our own images and took a snapshot of how the other person had arranged them and then we finally put them order we thought looked best. I really enjoyed the task especially as whenever i'm creating/designing something I always think how would someone else view this? what what they do to make it better? and it really just helps to evaluate your own work.