Unit X: James Long - Generic Garments

As we are looking as a group at sportswear, i brought in a few of my own vintage sportswear jackets picked up at a kilo sale a while ago to draw from. 

We need to not only look at how the garment sits on the manequin but also its fuctional detaials, finishings and also play around with it on the manequin to maybe invert inovative shapes for garment designs. This way of finding inspiration for garment design is one of my favourites along with looking at my intial, primary research for interesting shapes. I also found a few tennis skirts and shorts whilst meandering a kilo sale, so took photos of these too.

I feel this way gives more inovative ideas and has more context your work, rather than just copying the shapes of yesteryear. I feel fashion design is about this experimentation to see how things can be applied to the body, especially in university when we have the most creative freedom. However i feel this can be difficult to communicate during group work. Ive staudied fashion design at level 5 (HND Fashion and Textiles) already so i have a good idea of what to do, but i feel i may be underestimated in my group for this knowledge as i now study textiles. So it can be difficult for me, along with anxiety to communicate that i am capable of these ideas and for people to trust my opinion. 

 

  

Above is my white sports adidas jacket from a vintage kilo sale -  so hopefully it is from the 70s! It is from Germany as the label is mainly German. I drew some of the functional details of this jacket and hopefully they will be used in the group file. the panels on this are across the body and change size from the front to the back. there is smll piping goinf down two pipe lines of eacharm and has white cuffs. there is a late adidas logo on the back of the jacket and his is something natalie had mentioned in a previous tutorial -  she suggested looking at the tennis racquets themselves and how they have the 'Wilson" branding on them and suggested we find a way of maybe nringing a James LOng branding into our designs so this is something i worked on whit a sweatshirt design which you shall see in later posts.

 

Above is another sporstwear jacket i found at a vintage kilo sale. i really appreciated the oanelling of this design especially on the left arm which i have photogrphied here. i think using oannelling in our designs with our sample would be very interesting and would be fun to mix up textures and prints.

 A Current trend i have seen in menswear design on the high street is using striped banding and ribbing - especially on sportsweat. on these garments it was on the shoulderand runnign down the arm to the cuff.

Below are photos of vintage tennis skirts and shorts. the first is the tennis skirt. it had an abstract print on the front and had two pleats on either side and the same pleats on the back with a button detail. it would be so interesting to work with a pleat for a few of our designs as that is what tennis garments mainly are made in. i find fabric manipulation fun and interesting to create so would enjot to do this.

The second is another a skit but this was more af an A line design so it feel differently yot the first skirt. this one also had short underneath it for the wearers dignity whilst play - practical. it also had a branding to the bottom left and an interesting mesh panel toward the bottom hem. 

Unit X: James Long - Bjorn Borg

After a workshop, it was decided we shall use 1970s tennis star, Bjorn Borg as our muse. He is the main face of tennis within that era and had a distinct look of shoulder length bushy curls, strong brow and sweatband.

These images are also realy good for garment research for our garment shape designs. We are looking at designing sportswear inspired by 1970s tenniswear. Here I see polo shirts with stripes and in a slim fit to the figure. There is also branding of Fila left of the centre fold on both shirt and shorts. The ornage jacket seen here has a similar tone to the orange we are using so maybe that is why it has caught my eye. It is an Adidas jacket with a raglan style sleeve and black ribbing for the collar and cuff which is connected with the black three stripes adidas is famous for.

Unit X: James Long - Colour Palette

After much Deliberation The group have decided on a colour palette consiting of cerisey pinks, burnt oranges. We also want to encorporate the copper foil into out design to reflect the rust inspiration we took from our macro images.

Unfortunately, we didnt decide to use any of the northern quarter sourced images we took and used ones we took in the studio. im unsure quite as to why the others were disreagreded and personally feel we could add more darker shades and cooler tones as James Long uses quite a dark palatte with bright accents, however i am excited to work with these colours and seeing how they apply to our future designs.

Unit X: James Long - Drawing Workshop

This week we had a drawing workshop to help us create initial drawings for our textile designs. I wanted to mainly focus on the colour in our macro images and the textures of the rust and peeling paints found in the images we had taken of decaying wall and graffiti on walls.

You can see there is quite a wide spectrum of colours in this first one but the main ones were a peachy colour, blue and cerise pinks. I used an array of papers to create a peeling effect and flicked paint and ink onto the drawing inspired by the flecks of paint as seen in the graffiti macro images.

Im quite pleased with this drawing but i feel it could use more ordered structure. Maybe to improve I could have used a typre of stencil or printed onto of it with such things as bubble wrap perhaps. 

The second drawing has a lot more order and structure in a way that I used stencils of nails and also stamped with the end of pipes to get the circular shapes. I stippled around the nail stencil to emulate the flecks of paint in some of the macro images. I also draw some of the pipe pieces one of the girls from my group brought in. These could work really well being embroidered onto a print design. I feel this drawing is a lot more of a James Long gritty kind of vibe as opposed to my first drawing which is quite colourful and clean. its important to think of the client or brand when designing to give context to your designs/drawings.

To develop this further I may scan this drawing into photoshop and play around with colours, compostion and pergaps create a digital print design from this. 

The group still hasnt decided on a colour pallete as of yet so this is the next steps for us along with further drawing, muse research and generic garment research.  

Unit X: James Long - Intitial ideas

In our group of six, we atteneded the introduction to the Jame Long briefing and were asked to think of themes for our fashion colletion. as a group we were a bit stuck for ideas and agreeeing on one theme. intially we thought of vintage american football, an a mechanical theme. However, during our talk with Tom, he mentioned that another big brand had just done american football as a theme and they had done it very well, so to create something unique; we would need to chose a different theme. He suggested looking at racing and formula one for example, however that is difficult for us to get primary reserch for, so we settled for vintgae tennis. The mechanical idea developed into firstly, macros images of invertabrates and insects and then finally onto rust and macro images of such. Below are some personal boards for James Long and the chosen theme.

Evaluation

Self initiated brief

For my self initiated brief, i decided to look at how weather effects things, mainly how light looks through different states of water. Whether that be rain and a window pane or frost/ice. at first i struggled with the idea of drawing weather as its not necessarily something you see, but after some research into what i actually like about my sources i.e: choosing words like directions, running down, contrast etc made it easier to create drawings. My favorite technique was use processes where i had little control over the final outcome of the drawing, so things like running paint down a board, fluid painting and ice dyeing fit the bill well. 

I mainly work in digital design for prints however i to like to use traditional studio print techniques to create rich and interesting background to print onto.

I wanted to design prints that could be used in block panels similar to Lisa Perrys designs. she uses geometric panels on her garments, so i wanted to experiment with how that would look with a print in those blocks. I think the overall outcome of the fashion illustrations i created inspired by Lisa Perry garment shapes are quite effective and breathe a different life into the design. the work was also contextualize by my trend research - looking at elemental trends for AW16 reflected my theme and sources.

To improve and develop this project further i would try to time manage myself better as i am now getting help with my anxiety, i feel that in future projects this will be easier to cope with thus making it easier for me to complete tasks in the studio and go to group workshops. i would have used the screens for foiling influenced by the work of Tracie Cheng and inspired by imagery of lightning storms.

Live Brief - Old Navy

This was a fun project for me, i decided to focus on the idea of holidays within the given theme of 'american road trips' given to us by Old Navy. so i begen my reserch looking at photos of American 1950s style motels and seaside imagery. i then began to draw these as motifs and after deciding on a colour palette i coloured them in using Photoshop to create these badge/patch looks. this was inspired by research i has seen on WGSN on a soft pop theme and a the use of badges and patches on denim garments. which was then confirmed by me seeing the trend whilst shopping. i would also use these motif to create fun tshirt repeat designs for the girls collections with the intention of these going onto t shirts. although they were designed for girls i feel they could work or womens aswell on casual t shirts and holidays garments. Inspired by working on denim, i began to paint onto denimns and using image maker to apply my 'badges'. the outcome was quite good and my colour palete looked pretty on denim blues. the image maker itself wasnt a great way to apply the badges onto the fabric, howver i was restrained with  time and it seemed the quickest way to gt the idea across onto fabric. They aren't all over prints but placement, i wanted a used messy but fun look for the denim.

If i were to develop this project further i was continue working on denim and maybe set up a few screens to get a precise print of my badge designs and also my repeat designs.

Live Brief: Visualiazations

Below are a few visualizations for the Old Navy life brief. the dungarees and jeans are designed for the women collections and the t shirt and pinafore is for the girls collection, however i feel they could work for all collections.