anything but typical.

We’re already working on our third project in my Fashion Design class, and I’m just getting around to posting about the first one. Gee-whiz. Needless to say, the semester has been intense and a whirlwind of sorts, and it’s not going to slow down until it’s over… and it’s never over! I do love it though. oh so much.

The prompt for our first project was “Subliminal Souvenirs: Develop a collection based on your own memories and reminders of experiences by looking inward and outward for inspiration.” (There was more to it than that, but I’ll spare you the lengthy PDF.) I have to be honest and say that it kind of stumped me at first, mainly because I felt like I didn’t have many things that would qualify as”subliminal souvenirs”. When I moved to San Francisco from Austin I left those kinds of things behind. However, this made me come up with ideas that were less obvious, but at the same time – in the end – really more obvious. The majority of my research book was filled with pictures from ACL, as well as children’s toys and other knick-knacks. I’ll try to scan the pages in and post them when I get a chance!

One major learning tool that our instructor had us use for this project was that each week we were required to find different fashion illustrators and use their styles to inspire our croquis/roughs. These are two of my better ones from the project.

Inspired by Richard Chai’s illustrations.

Inspired by Stephanie Jiminez’s illustrations. I met Stephanie when I took some classes at the Austin School of Fashion Design about a year ago, and I loved her drawing style! I followed through with her illustrations as the major inspiration for my final girls.

On the day of our critique I ended up with 15 final looks and these are what I consider the best of those 15.

Overall it was a really good critique! (yay!) My instructor liked the boxiness/angularness of the collection as well as the oversized cuts. He also liked the hair (my signature from my previous projects [here and here] wrangled in a bit). He did suggest that I make the girl more “realistic”… ie shorter legs, arms, and neck. At the time I didn’t really agree (probably because I was running on 3 nights of no sleep) but looking at them now I definitely do and I’m glad I made an adjustmant for my second project.