Organic Geometry

This is it! The finals of my first year in the Parsons Fashion Design program. Doesn't it seem like I've been doing this forever? Boy, it has been a long year, but a good one at that.

My course load this semester has been a little hectic. I take two studio electives on top of my core studio classes which means a lot of creating things with my hands, which as I'm sure you can assume, is time consuming (now you smirk at my charming rhyme). Finals can be stressful, but what is even more stressful is when you're making visual representations of your capabilities. What I mean is, unlike writing a final essay or exam where only your prof. or T.A. see your final work, the entire class, profs, and anyone passing by the darn classroom can see whether you put your all into your final or not i.e. lots of room for judgement and comparison. This work also goes directly into our portfolios which are presented to potential employers. So, it better be good. Damn good. Needless to say, us fashion students need to make sure all our time, money, and effort are going to pay off when we're finished, and when you multiply that by six (the number of studio classes I take), we're in for a lot of work. 

So that brings me to this project. The final for my 2D/Integrated Studio class is a group project. The assignment was designed by the people who designed the curriculum which basically translates to an overly wordy and confusing assignment. Similar to the summer assignment wording for those of you who witnessed me go through that...

We are tasked with designing a collection that is in some way, shape, or form, connected to our cultural backgrounds. My group chose to focus on cultural displacement as we all come from different countries and are situated in a new and very different culture. Then, as I've written about before, we allow the theme to organically grow and incorporate different inspirations from different areas of our lives. This leaves us with the theme:

Boxy, spring, architectural, triangular motif, cultural displacement.

What a mouthful, huh? However, with some conceptualizing and creativity we were able to translate that into a pretty killer aesthetic that is leading us towards some great clothing. Below is our mood board to kind of help you get on our train of thought. 

The whole concept is based on putting something/someone in a box that they might not necessarily fit in - placing the organic (your origin) into geometry (the cultural box) to create cultural displacement. Therefore, the organic human form into geometric/boxy clothing. Ta-Da! Logic. Kind of.
The illustration at the beginning of this post is the design I just recently got approved to create. The white fabric is hand treated which means those triangles on it I will be hand drawing with fabric markers - yet another reinforcement of our theme - hand drawn triangles combining the organic and the geometric. Mine is a rather flat design, however, my group members are doing some pretty radical 3D designing which some intricate applique and crazy shapes sewn onto the garment. I tend to lean towards the ready-to-wear, less couture style of designing...If you haven't noticed.
Each person is required to make a dress, so four dresses total, plus illustrations of a collection of 20 looks, their technical flats, mood board and fabric board (which is all the standard). And on top of all that, branding the entire project with logos, hang-tags, packaging, etc. Lots and Lots to do!
I'm headed to midtown right now to purchase my fabrics so I can start drawing on this puppy. The more I can get done in my day off (I don't have class on Wednesdays), the more time I'll have for the other dress, fabric, and purse I'm creating for my other finals! Yahoo!

Wish me luck!