The Final Countdown.

As the head of Art Foundation so humourously put it – it is indeed the final countdown and in the final weeks we should be completing our final outcomes and compiling our sketchbooks – to date I have one initial research sketchbook – one developmental sketchbook and around 10 pieces of A1 works – excluding life drawing. In all full honesty my work has been rather scattered due to my repeated fear of confronting tutors for tutorials but I’m hoping in my final outcomes sketchbook I can tie everything into my final outcomes – explaining how I got there, when and where. Ofcourse there’s also the aid of the critical appraisal which is due next week.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s been happening – I attempted to make the skirt and this was a success and a full afternoon spent n the metal workshop allowed me to make a metal corset, at first I’d desired to simply mould and hammer the metal around the mannequin, but after being told that that’d be far too difficult to do I was offered an option of using strips. I took on this advice and instead made a layered metal corset which reminded me somewhat of Dolce & Gabanna’s Metal corset/dress and Giorgio Armani’s logo. Hmm!
The corset itself was difficult to keep on the model as it didn’t flex as much as I’d assumed it to – meaning I had to return to metal workshop and ask for extra pieces of metal to be attached to the corset – and after doing this, the corset managed to stay on the model much better.
Conducting photoshoots has to be one of my favourite perks of doing fashion and so I went scouting for a suitable area – there was a garage door which caught my eye, but further exploring lead to a church which had equally appealing qualities due to it’s architectural structure – which didn’t interfere with my outfit but rather complimented it with it’s geometrical shapes and dusted history colour.

Here is the full desired outcome – it should work somewhat like this at the final show. Aluminum corset & pleated blue skirt was made by me, everything else is models own. The blue skirt was actually influenced by the indents of a certain glass shard, I found this interesting and so I drew the shard, photocopied it and started folding into the crevices which created a pleated effect – I saw this working really well as a pleated skirt feature so I explored this and the outcome was as above. I was also really torn as to having the skirt maxi or mini, but maxi provided the volume needed to emphasize the pleats where as mini gave the skirt freedom and more volume up top.
In the end I stuck with maxi.

At this point I had neglected the copper plates but I had other ideas in mind for that piece.

FMP – Finishing touches.

{Note : I made the Lady GaGa-resque glass glasses by myself with smashed glass and a pair of sunglasses from primark – I don’t consider this to be part of my original work – just an accessory for fun.}

It’s the final two weeks of my foundation course and it’d be the biggest understatement of  my life if I said things were hectic. I’ve began seriously toiling and considering some final outcomes accompanied by sketches and I’ve been developing my work – working with a lot of metal-imitation media or actual metal itself. My fascination right now is with copper plates and that could is quite heavily influenced my El Anatsui {Also one of my contextual artists} and his use of recycled litter i.e. coke cans, bottle caps, metal packaging and such and he created a tapestry type installation that I saw in the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

For this – likewise in the previous post – I’ve attempted to create the copper covered leotard fully. However when I attempted this I found the shoulder pad an increasingly difficult feature to deploy, the fabric drape would be too heavy and simply drag down or ruin the structure – so I began sticking to more simple methods – I created the leotard with the sleeves and then I want to continue to add copper plates – gradually covering the whole of the garment.

Here is the made and finished stitched product being modeled by a fellow fashion student.

 

Front view of the long-side-sleeved-leotard.

Black jersey happens to drape incredibly well.

And here’s my latest idea –

 

Front

 

Side

Close up of the pleating at the back.

With the avant garde skirt I plan to make a metal corset.

The skirt is pleated accordingly to a pattern I found in the creveces of a cracked glass shard – it was clearly smashed however there were interesting patterns that streaked through it’s side and I copied – traced and developped this for the this skirt piece.I only need the metal corset to match and that will be one of my main outcomes. The metal corset will be quite heavily influenced by Dolce & Gabbana’s metal corsets collection also, and initial sketches of various items in my initial research sketchbook.

Final Major Project – ‘Lustre’

After an early January trip to New York – which was also the research week of my 10 week project, also known as the final major project of this course, I settled on the theme of ‘Lustre’ – before making this my final idea I considered other topic names such as ‘lights’ or ‘Reflective Surfaces’ my other choice would’ve been ‘magnitude’ but I settled for ‘Lustre’.

 

‘Lustre’ came from the wave of inspiration that I felt standing on top of the empire state building. The city was lit up and looked like a path of stars trailing across the floor. It was stunning. I wanted to translate this into my own fashion project but little did I know how difficult it would be.
In my statement of intent, I clearly noted that I wanted to create fashion that included shine but I wanted to use unconventional materials in hopes that I’d be able to make something quite eccentric {isn’t that what fashion’s clearly all about?}

So I began looking at things that possessed obvious ‘Lustre’ such as glass and mirrors and metals, but mostly glass – I began finding the cracked contours of it really interesting so looked into that. As for the rest of the items – it’s an assortment of household items that were reflective and shone in some way. As my work developed I got really interested in metals and started basing my project around that.
I looked at the shapes that my initial sketches formed and tried to translate that into a silhouette for a garment.

As the weeks flew by I began toiling . . .



I will upload more sketchbook work & sewing ideas later.
This is just to get my blogging hiatus off the ground.
I’ve been rather negligent I know – But for the final few weeks I’ll jam my very slow beginning of this project into a full episode.

Worry not & wish me luck.

Watch this space!
x