Intentions | Direction

One of the main criteria of this unit is to think about your work, its purpose and audience. I am really interested in printing for fashion, I know that almost for sure. However I have never thought about whether I want to go in the direction of high end fashion or high street.

I have thought about it a lot in the last few days and I came to my own conclusion. I thought about how I would feel seeing my work on a catwalk, and as proud and incredible that would be I realised I would get more of a buzz from seeing a regular person wearing my prints in the street. Obviously this makes me want to design for high street fashion, for example retailers like Topshop, H&M and Urban Outfitters. I've realised the 'dream' is to have my designs available to the average person like myself, and to remain affordable.

I did some research on high street clothing and their materials. I found that high street clothing is largely made up of polyester and cotton. The fabrics used on the high street need to be cheap, fast and easily accessible. Due to this I had my first set of digital prints done on a Cotton Voile. I also had a set of prints done on Crepe de Chine, which is a silk that is a little more expensive. I chose this because the example fabric showed that the colours come out vibrant and opaque, whereas the cotton provides more of a translucent print. It will be interesting to see how the two fabrics produce the same print designs.

I also took a look at WGSN to see what kind of fabrics are set to be used in upcoming trends. I found that a lot of S/S15 predictions make use of sheer fabrics along with opaques. I like this trend and it is totally adaptable to high street fashion. I like the idea of an opaque dress with sheer sleeves or sheer sectioning…