Monday, May 16, 2011

It all started with a dress...

Finally! A post dedicated to my mini-collection from my Fashion Design class at the Academy of Art. Let me just sate now that the Fashion Design class was about creating a concept and putting it into a collection. There was no dress making, nor will I ever make couture dresses. If I did make a single dress that would be called Fashion Construction.

Now, the whole collection started with a simple drawing of a dress that I drew during English months before the design class (pardon the white-out). 


I think I when I was drawing this dress, I had Oscar Del La Renta in mind. This dress had a softness and hardness to it at the same time. I love black and white also. So I started on my collection backwards, and my whole collection is based off the idea of this dress, though the dress was not even in the final collection. Funny how that works isn't it?

So after the first day of class we already started researching more inspiration. I needed something more to work off of. That's when we took a trip to the amazing library the AAU has. I looked through books on trees and I found this one amazing book. I scanned the pictures that I loved the most. When I got home, I posted them on the doors outside my room and stared at them for while, studying the bark, textures, lines, branches, shapes. I loved the darkness and eeriness of the trees, yet the dreaminess as well. 


Posted next to the scanned photos was film I took down at the pond by my house. The film was expired and it created the colour palette for my collection as you will see below.

At the next class, we brought all of our inspiration in and started drawing directly from it on tracing paper.


In the following classes we drew a lot of bodies for practice, then many sketches and ideas of what we envisioned in our collections. We decided our customers, silhouettes, styles, shapes, season, and colours. During this time I was inspired by the shapes of Jil Saunder, and the chicness of Jason Wu.


After that we created a mood board, which showed off our inspiration for our collection. I tore pages from the most recent issue of 180 and set that ad my background. I glued on some of my film, traced trees, and bark and a branch from the birch tree in my backyard. I also incorporated quotes from the tree book. It had our colour palette and fabric swatches as well.




At last, my collection. I don't think there is anything else to say. 


 Siofra was a really wonderful teacher; she was so cute, knowledgeable, and had great ideas. I'm really quite sad that this class is now over and that I can't take any more Pre-College classes there anymore. If you have the chance this summer, I really suggest you take a class or two if you want to go into the arts. These classes have changed my life in the past year. You will meet wonderful people who share the same interests as you and you will learn so much.

I hope you enjoyed this.

Love, Jenae.

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