What I Did While I Wasn't Blogging

In my post titled, "Can You Keep Up with Fashion?" I concluded that I, in fact, could not. So during all the months of my absence, I was quite busy trying to learn what it takes to become a fashion designer. Fashion Design 1, taught by the Fashion Design and Merchandising Department Head at Drexel University, Roberta Gruber, was a great way to experiment and delineate the processes and techniques most appropriate to carry out a designer's vision. The theme was "Connections and Extensions" which refers to the way all of the designers used shared inspiration, which varied by project, to connect to fashion design and extend one idea into many for a collection.

Challenge 1 started with a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's permanent Brancusi exhibit, which displays his "primitive modern" sculptures. We were asked to take the feeling of his sculptures, which included the way his works were displayed, and create a garment with a "crisp" feeling that emphasized the neck and shoulder area.

I came up with a twisted detail that ran along the bust and down to the back of the garment, exposing the beauty of the shoulder blades, and highlighting the shoulders with a feeling of openness.

Challenge 2 began with a trip to the produce section of Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market. We were to think about "Biomimicry" and told that many design solutions can be found within the natural world. My produce of choice was the beautiful cranberry bean, which lent itself to the mandatory use of complementary and analogous colors. My creation was further inspired by a display of hand-embroidered quilts from Bengal on show at the PMA's Perlemen Building.
To be honest, my original drapes were much more beautiful in muslin. When I transferred the muslin drape to a pattern, the folds and pleats became darts, which shaped and molded the fabrics in a much different way. To finish, I spent hours hand-embroidering the piece in colors reminiscent of the cranberry bean, trying to mimic the way the angles fell when the beans were stacked upon each other.

The third challenge was brought to us by an AMAZING exhibit of the decorative arts of Marcel Wanders, a designer looking to the future and the past at the same time, who, in everything he makes, transports his viewer to a different time and space. We were to think about illusion in the sense of "visual stretch," which I attempted by using the knit textured black in the center of the garment. The curved princess-style cut of the dress is super slimming and definitely elongates the torso. This, the simplest of my challenge solutions, was very well received at critique, and loved by many of the young college students who are my peers.
Finally, for the fourth challenge, we went to the Simeone Automobile Museum in South Philadelphia, one of the largest private collections of antique cars in the world. It was beautiful. I had no idea that I even liked cars until I went to the showroom, which was freezing on a cold winter day. We were to take inspiration from the cars and translate that into style lines in a garment.
My original piece consisted of over 25 different pattern pieces, with the fit of the garment coming not from darts, but from these style lines. After three muslin fittings, my design was certainly simplified, though not by much.
My concept was thinking about what a woman would wear as she was commuting in a vehicle of the future... My girl was a Judy Jetson of sorts. My favorite part of the garment was the way the "racing stripes" flowed into the pockets of the dress, and also the way the pointed light pink detail on the back became sort of skeletal. This dress was also received well, yet minor construction issues prevented me from being able to wear it... yet. I will definitely fix it in the near future... when it's not too hot to wear wool.