BA (Hons) Fashion: Fashion Print
My initial inspiration stems from amassing a collection of black and white images of early camouflage. I began to colour these figures with vibrant, lucid tones and work into the patterns to alter the interplay of textures. The collection started to become an abstract exploration of Military and animal camouflage applied through a variety of painterly mark making techniques and focusing on a tactile representation of natural forms. Whilst experimenting with the distortion of these shapes I began looking at traditional Chinese woven fabrics and seeing similarities in the mark making. I wanted to combine this stylistic way of depicting scenery on fabric with military prints such as German Plane tree camouflage, British WW2 Brushstroke and Vietnamese Tiger stripe. I also looked at the finishings and structure of Chinese dress in order to inform my silhouette, breaking up panels of print with grey curved strips of cotton velvet. The opulent nature of this type of dress also informed my choice of fabrics. I used a combination bonded heavy satins, velvet and fabrics normally used for upholstery for their rich texture and structural quality. I explored ways of highlighting the thick pile of these fabrics using flocking and embossing. Rather than using silk screen printing across the entire collection I used a selection of vinyls and plastics cut into shapes and then melted to the fabrics in order to create decorative camouflage motifs. What emerged through my design process was an unwitting and perhaps subconscious evocation of a childhood fascination with a sense of escapism inherent within both the visual aesthetic of science fiction and the idealised representation of the clothed female figure in 19th century Japanese wood cuts, both framed by and incorporated into the natural landscape.