1st year projects

As always I come up pretty late with roundup posts, even though I’ve had my fair share of free time and good internet to write this I’m deciding to do it on a teary train journey after an emotional trip home for reasons that I don’t feel like delving into atm.

I was inspired by Mayagoo and her semester roundups posts to write up all the projects I’ve done this year in uni, as well as some other fun things I’ve been working on.

Project 1.

Introduction to Fashion – Love and Hate Project

I struggled a lot with the start of uni, it took me a long time to get my rhythm together and find my people and the same goes for my first project, I didn’t really understand the project and took a lot of time figuring out how to process and work through my ideas. The brief was to take pictures of things you love and hate which seems like the stupidest theme to me as I generally don’t think to take pictures of things I hate and that became a struggle to get inspired by pictures I’d taken last minuet which resorted in a really shit sketchbook to begin with. I only really liked the workshops in the first semester, knit, print and sewing where I just got the chance to make and do things rather than struggle, and I mean struggle, through pattern cutting. My final piece was a knitted full length dress inspired by the shapes of Swedish architecture and the layering of slate and despite the heartache of fully fashioning and patronising metal work technicians I actually love the dress.

   

Project 2. Black and White project

After a full garment to make for the first project our lectures let us relax a little with a textiles project based on the theme black and white… I’m never going to be a minimalist and I get so bored by ‘monochrome fashion’ (just because you do a variation on a 1960’s black and white check mini dress it don’t make you saint Lauren) the idea of a whole project on black and white depressed me creatively for a long while. My theme was a mix of body ‘horror’, surreal black and white photography, kinda gross stuff like braces and teeth especially and old weird horror movies like Spider Baby and Twins of Evil. I think this project was probably my weirdest, having to explain that the knit pattern I created that ‘looks like its inspired by florals or light delicate prints’ was actually taken from a Richard Avedon photo of a naked guy covered in bees wasn’t my finest moment. Out there themes do generally interest me more though, I’m not interested in doing fruit inspired collections or crap about structural architecture, concepts not clichés please.

The finals outcome for this project was a collection of textile samples and mine were mostly weird treated knit samples, lazercutting or embroidery. They were all supposed to be a bit surreal, creepy to the touch kind of samples that make you feel weird but still like you want to touch it.

    

Side Project

COS Research booklet

Part of our degree is Professional Practice module which is should really be titled ‘lets not leave these students with no prospects once they graduate’ aka: lets learn how to perform properly in industry and sit through boring powerpoint presentations. As you can tell I didn’t really enjoy this module as much. The biggest project was to make a trend booklet for the company COS and I chose the environment and survival, even though I kind of hated it my booklet was one of the few sent to COS and to one of our twin unis in Europe for them to look through so I guess that was pretty cool.

(I couldn't figure out how to turn off the guidelines while taking screen shots and my subscription for adobe suite has run out so apologies)

(the spaces are for textile samples and paint charts that I stuck on once printed)

3^rd Project – Topshop Digital Wave outfit

Ahh consumerism, my least favourite part about studying fashion, market research is literally my least enjoyable activity and just reminds me how much my degree and hopefully future career depends on coercing people into spending money on things they probably don’t really need. This brief was to design an range of outfits for Topshop based on a WGSN future trend and make one of the outfits. I chose Digital Wave because really a trend based in bright colours, futuristic textiles and retro styling was probably the only one I was going to pick really. Once again I mostly stayed in knit but mixed it up with some other textile ideas, making a clear plastic denim jacket with black glitter trapped inside and a body con sporty knitted dress underneath with bright electric coloured stripes. I actually loved this make, even if it was a bit hap hazard, a lot of the working out was done while I was making the final thing and some of the seams on the jacket might have been glued down afterwards but who really cares right? 

     

 

  

A whole first year gone and this is what I've gone and done.

I might do an outside of uni catch up post aswell as I did do a lot of stuff outside of uni this year and especially this summer 

xxx

Rosie