Second Brief

Ok, sooooooo....I have definitely been neglecting my blog, but to be fair life has been hectic. I have just finished and handed in my second brief of my first year fashion degree. I'm pretty pleased with my final outfits so I shall give a brief run through of how they have come about.
We where given Japanese fashion as a starting point and as I've always been fascinated with origami i decided to take the 'traditional Japan' route. I looked into origami but couldn't really find anything that hadn't already been used to death in fashion... until I came across origami tesselations. They are another form of paper folding but on more of a 2D plane than regular origami. This was new to me and I quickly became obsessed, so I had to use it. Here's an example:

I sat down and worked out some different ways of transferring this folding technique to fabric as it does not have the same qualities as paper. I also had to contend with the fact that our brief specified that we had to combine denim and jersey, not the easiest task. Finally I came up with the idea of using thick bull denim as the shapes normally produced by the folding, sewing them onto the jersey in the right places and then folding the jersey around the denim. The stiffness of the denim helped keep the shape in the jersey. A bit of topstitching to hold it down et voila. Also I used some thinner denim and just folded it like the paper and topstitched that down. I loved both techniques so I made sure I used both in my two final oufits. The outfit on the left (below) was based on a triangle tesselation design. I tesselated stretch denim to create jeggings and carried on the triangle theme in the t-shirt.. The dress on the right was a combination of hexagons and triangles, applying the denim to the jersey before folding. Once again I carried on the triangle theme by giving the dress batwings which create triangles when the arms are stretched out. The colour scheme was based on a purple Japanese flower.

You can't quite see the detail in the trousers so here's a close up:

I loved making these outfits. The tesselations were tricky because the angles and measurements of the shapes had to be spot on, but it was definitely worth the time and effort. So thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed. xoxox