Unit X: Evaluation

Research

 

My initial research commenced by looking at past and present James Long collections as a secondary source. Having never heard of James Long before now, this enabled me to envision the type of menswear collection that was expected of me. I didn't want to stray too much from the style in which James Long works. Our original narrative 'RAF pilot crashes and parachutes into the rainforest', instantly helped me to select key garments such as flight suits, leather jackets, bomber jackets and durable jeans. This also linked us to climbing/ army and survival wear, which was a perfect start in visualising the theme of our/ my personal collection. I also took inspiration from the rainforest itself from a textiles point of view, where the colour palette originated from. The blue in the rivers and pattern of poisonous frogs, the green of the plants, orange in the tribes. As well as this, the tasselled textures for my denim samples originated from the textures. I took secondary sources from an article about the Amazon in the National Geographic.

 

Development

 

I struggled more with the development process. Having never tried fashion before and coming from a textile background, I found it hard to know what or how much was expected of me. I enjoyed the stand workshops which brought together all of our groups garments which were generic to our theme. The styling element of this interested me much more than designing and altering the garments myself. I realise that I could have been more experimental and could have used many different mediums to express my ideas, but this also came down to time management. I struggled to concentrate on the design element, and didn't necessarily enjoy it as much as I thought it would.

 

Reflection

 

This was my first project throughout the two years where I've worked in a group. Overall, I feel that we worked well together. This was also made evident when pitching to Tom Norcombe for James Long, and realising how closely we've worked together compared to other groups. There could have been more communication in terms of creating samples as it would have been beneficial to cross over specialisms ad bring the collection together. I feel that my time management wasn't as good as it could have been, and would have like to have taken my time more on the development processes, and to produce more samples (even though the samples I did produce were very time consuming). I have improved my Photoshop skills to a great extent and am now extremely confident in projecting my textile designs onto fashion garments.

 

I believe I've learnt a lot about myself during this project. I did this with the intentions of finding out if fashion was for me or not, and I've now realised that the way I work, and the work that I produce is much more suited to interiors. I'm glad I tried something new, and can finally cross it off the list.