Designing a wearable piece of Art

Based on my chosen theme of ballet I designed a mood board. Therefore I printed different images that reminds me of ballet like a ballerina or a tutu. I also draw some images that I glued to the mood board.

Ballet was also my inspiration for the next task which told us to design an outfit relating to the theme. When I think about ballet I think about dynamic and elegance. Therefore I wanted to design an outfit that conveys those adjectives.

I started with a quick sketch just to get an idea of what I am going to produce.

The shape should be curvy and wrapped around the woman´s body in one line to remind on a pirouette. 

After that I started producing and tried to transfer my idea into a three dimensional object. Because I did not draw a whole outfit I started experimenting with my idea.

I wanted to have a high collar which I made out of three different layers to also create nice patterns.

The outfit relates to a ballerina and therefore to a woman. In fact of that I used four different layers to produce the chest part of the outfit. I payed attention to have smooth transitions so the curvy shaped aspect would not get lost.

Then I put three different layers at the behind of the woman so it would look nicely. All areas have the same pattern.

The fact that I have a dynamic formed outfit is the reason that I produced an asymmetric outfit.

After I was done with designing the shape I added some details and I thought about how to attach the piece of art to a human body so the artwork would actually be wearable by someone.

I decided to add two thin stripes on the button of the outfit to prevent it from coming loose. In addition I added a flower which reminds on a tutu and some curvy stripes of paper.

Those make the outcome appear more elegant.

 

I enjoyed designing my own piece of art because I have not done that before. I think it was good that we had to base our outfit on a theme so we had to consider how to express this theme through the design. I liked the aspect of communicating with help of the outcome.

At first I had some problems how to produce an three dimensional outfit using the mannequin. Therefore I sketched my idea so I would have an small image to look at and refer to.

Later we got into groups and had to come up with one adjective that describes our outfit. The adjective that was chosen for me was brave which was my new theme.

Referring to brave I had to change my mood board that based on ballet so that it would fit to my piece of art which I created.

To design the perfect mood board it is important to think about the layout, format, typography, texture, materials, images and the narrative.

Referring to that I think it was helpful to explain those different aspects before repeating the task.

If all aspects bases on the theme then I would have the perfect mood board that fits to my outfit.

At first I did not know what to attach to my mood board.
It really helped me that we have done an example in class, were we had to mind map a narrative from a short video. Regarding to that I decided to brainstorm my thoughts about BRAVE and create a mind map. This task showed me how important brainstorming is. If you do not brainstorm your ideas then you are not going to achieve a good outcome.

After that I looked at books and magazines based on the topics I wrote down. I also took photographs that relates to my theme and looked at some images in the internet. The outcome of this is a wide range of various images. Furthermore I added some text images that refers to people who were brave in any kind.

In the end I highlighted some photos by using more than one layer. In addition I added some material which is black and strong so it would convey the theme as well.

This day helped me a lot to learn about fashion and textile but also about fashion promotion which I did not know about before. I learned that fashion is also an artwork to express feelings and to communicate. The tasks were tough but good to have a better understanding of fashion.
Furthermore, I learned that the narrative aspect in fashion promotion is one of the most important things because it is all about conveying a story to get the costumers attention and build up a brand value.