Some of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a while – I have always found myself drawn to patterns and mathmatics. Thank you http://synapticstimuli.com/ for bringing them to my attention.

Reminds me that I need to look again at hyperbolic plane tessellation…

Charlotte was a undergrad and masters student of mine last year and the year before. She’s a clever woman. It was partly inspired by the “Brown Dress project” by Alex Martin – and Charlotte wore a dress she designed for 209 days (video below) throughout her 4th year of study here at Massey University. She designed her graduate collection”Pickled” in response to this experience and says it changed her view on fashion and it’s relationship to consumerism. Pickled was dyed using things she could eat (like tea/coffe and beetroot) and was made without metallic or plastic fastenings. Her masters project developed this further and applied it to the local community – fashion design as a service for longevity and developing relationships with the community.

I’m working on a “twinset” for a Biennale I’ve been accepted for in Korea in November. I’m about to make up my first half scale prototype on it to see how its going. I’m aiming for something quite minimalist and graphic as it’s been inspired by typography and Kimono.

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I’ll post up images once I’ve made one up – which shouldn’t be too long, but if it sucks I’ll work on it a bit first! My initial idea was to digitally print the typography on it – to keep it flat and crisp but digital printing doesn’t cope that well with flat colour – but I don’t have a screen big enough to screen print it. Any ideas? I could hand dye it, but i’m not totally sold on my hand painting skills to be honest… and yes – these patterns are printed on 9 sheets of A3 paper and suck together with tape… I’d LOVE a digital textile printer – even just for half scale…

I’m going to be presenting a paper at IFFTI 2010 at the end of March on fashion sustainability and copyright issues and the following wee snippet from a public discussion at the 2008 Ready to Share: Fashion and the ownership of creativity event, caught my eye.

Laurie Racine: …how do you think fashion would be different it if had to obey the copyright laws?
Guy Trebay: There’d be no fashion.
Tom Ford: It’s true.
Guy Trebay: There’d be no fashion.
Laurie Racine: Nothing else to say?

Guy Trebay: I don’t know how anyone could expand on that. It just wouldn’t exist.

In terms of developing a sustainable fashion industry one of the main problems the fashion industry has is the speed of change and the subsequent waste generated – While I don’t want there to be “no fashion”, it is possible (and often used as a reason why not) that enforcing stringent copyright law on fashion designs would slow down the fashion industry.

If every designer had to be able to prove if asked where their idea come from – or to clearly reference (like you do when you write an paper) – what would happen? The END OF FASHION!? Or do you think that morally designers are restrained in this way anyway so copyright would have little effect?

I was asked to design a hoodie for a friend of mine using zero-waste pattern cutting and as I’ve never attempted menswear before using this process i was a bit apprehensive. Timo does it so well and I’m definitely more of a womenswear designer. After begining the design I found myself with alot of extra fabric which in womenswear can be more easily integrated into the design. My menswear client is a bit of a bloke – skater and wears the usual streetwear styles – so flounces would not be acceptable. So I decided perhaps i could design a hoodie/t’shirt combo on the same pattern to use up the extra bits. Perhaps it’s cheating, but i feel like it’s sensible…

Materialbyproduct have done a similar thing – I think they did a dress in two ways, one was a simple dress with a standard fit and the negative space was draped to become the other dress which was far more experimental looking. In this case I’m trying to design both garments to be acceptable to by regular streetwear wearing bloke friend – therefore I’m designing both at the same time. It’s almost like a twin set for men!

It will be printed digitally also, and ive got a few ideas for how that might look already. I think for fabrics i will use a reasonably heavy weight double knit so it can function well as the fabric for both the hoodie and tshirt.

Anyways, here is my design at planning stage – the colours help me to decode what goes where and is a new technique im trying out – it won’t be those colours.

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Here are some general instructions and guides as to the process I use when pattern cutting for zero-waste.

Instructions

Feel free to try to decode them – sorry no images as yet. And please make any suggestions you can think of that might improve them.

Massey University are holding their annual Creative Arts Festival Blow in Wellington, NZ this November and I’m involved in two events/exhibitons. Surplus and Creativity: Design and The Ready-Made and Designing for our Future Selves. Anybody in Wellington should head along to these and the MANY other events that are taking place – in particular Exposure 09 and the Tenth Edition: Graduate Fashion Show where the next generation of NZ designers show us what they are made of!