Design development week

Day 1

This week is design development week, and I have enjoyed the demand of quickly coming up with multiple new design concepts. I began by using a single image to inspire my designs, and tried to extract the unusual shapes within it to create new features on my garments. It was extremely difficult to create continuous designs in such a short space of time, as well as thinking about form and composition.

Below are my outcomes from this task and we were required to design using a fine liner. Although this is a medium I not used to sketching in and is something I don't particularly like using, it was a helpful method of learning to design using more confident lines, which resulted in much bolder design concepts. We designed in stages, so I began by focusing on ideas for just collars, then jackets, seams, pockets, and we eventually moved onto designing more refined complete garments, including trousers and skirts, however they were still very fast sketches. I think I was successful in understanding how to come up with more than one design quickly, and to have more confidence in making mistakes and refining them, however I don't think all of my outcomes were a success. I am more drawn to the collar and jacket design concepts. I think that my ideas are more individual and I like how the collars themselves are quite exaggerated, and this was made easier with the use of a fine liner pen as I was able to effectively mark make, however the skirt and trouser designs have no form or silhouette. To improve upon this when sketching in the future I would perhaps focus on drawing the part of the garment that I wish to develop instead of the entire product.

Day 2 

We moved onto the stand for our next stage of design development so that we were able to understand how a garment is likely to drape around the body, and to explore ideas quickly in a more creative way. To create a initial shape which was going to form the basic sillouhette, we used an object that was personal to us, and was interesting to look at and abstract unusual shapes from. I chose the Turkish Eye, as i am half Turkish and the eye is representative of my culture. I began by making very rough sketches of the object, trying my best to really isolate the most interesting parts, and I eventually created a delicate design of interlocking ovals. The idea of this task was to replicate the design ten times and cut them out, so that we could later add them onto other people designs. Before we could do this, we needed to enlarge our initial shape by ten, so that it was big enough to drape around the manikin.

My shape was quite difficult to place on the manekin, as the large ovals bent out of shape and failed to fall flat arounf the figure, however this opened my mind up to new ways of designing, as i realised that garments don't have to entirely lay flat on the body, things can come away from the body itself, lift up, twist around and even fold. Once i draped my shape onto the manikin, we moved onto another manikin of our peers, and began to use one of our ten cut out shapes and added them onto their existing deisgn. The aim of this was to try and build a wearable outfit, so we added our shapes onto areas that didn't have straps, or parts that didn't join entirely around the neck. Once we had done this exercise, we moved back onto our manikins to see how our designs have been changed, then continued the exercise until we developed five or six different design ideas.

I really enjoyed this task, because it forces you to become more creative and to think about how you can add new dimensions to a design. I also really liked seeing how my peers added their paper designs onto mine, as some were forming off the body, interlocking into my designs, and even rising from the shoulder. It was a great way of becoming inspired by each others way of designing and having fun with paper manipulation. 

I have also started to look at existing designers work for inspiration. One of my favourite fashion designers is Valentino, and I have allot of fashion history books based on him! I found inspiration in one of his books called "themes and variations" and I came across a fall/winter 2007 gown that had huge layers of overlapping circular shapes. I found that this really related to my theme, and I have generated ideas for my collection by exaggerating basic circular shapes. I selected three of the most inspirational images and made some sketches to help 

progress my ideas. 

I also looked into 50's Balengiaga and DIor coats which show exaggerate collars and features which will further inspire my collection

Below are some images of how i have begun to develop ideas for my collection. I based my design concepts around oval and large circular overlaying shapes, so i played around with large paper cut outs and pinned them onto manikins in a variety of ways that i can later develop into a final outcome. I then made some  developed sketches underneath to use as alternative ideas to the paper designs on the manikin. 

I carried out the same process with ideas for sleeves, using paper templates and making quick sketches.

Initial idea for final collection and colour ways