Unit X | Concept and Colour Palette

Although I missed the first week of Unit X due to being on a study trip in New York, myself and Pipp came back and got stuck in straight away. Our group had already chosen the concept of Martial Arts, which I am really excited about as I've never considered it before. I feel that it will be fun to experiment with. We have also chosen to do womenswear. James Long is primarily menswear although they have had womenswear collections in the past which we have all taken a liking to.

From researching James Long, we discovered that he largely uses a darker colour palette and regularly uses Navy. He keeps an edgy look to his collections throughout, and doesn't go overboard with colour. As our concept is martial arts, we aim to use a lot of light, free flowing fabrics and those that have a lot of drape, similar to fabrics used in the uniforms.
James Long's SS13 collection was a little more feminine than his others, with more girlish structure and drapes.

His SS14 collection was a lot more boxy and square, but had a lot of references to sportswear. We decided our aim is to try and create a balance between the two different approaches, and see if we can incorporate both into one collection.

Our group presented the brief ideas to Tom from James Long on monday, and he also seems to like the concept. We had already prepared a dark toned colour scheme with flashes of neon, however he restricted us to a completely grey scale colour palette. At first I thought this might make things easy as choosing colours and dying fabrics is made simpler. Actually, getting a completely grey, black, and white colour scheme to work successfully in fashion is easier said than done. Nevertheless who doesn't like a challenge...
We took our colour scheme from two martial arts images we found while researching.

Locating | Engineering Prints

This is the first Unit in which I have experimented with Stand Work, as it was suggested I should experiment with it in my tutorial last week. I pinned Fabric and Paper prints onto a mannequin in order to get a sense of where the prints could be placed on a garment. I feel this process was incredibly successful and I will definitely be repeating in the future.
The only mistake I made was not photographing infront of a white background. The placement can still be seen however it would have been much more clear infront of a clean white backdrop. I will remember this for next time however for now I will just be editing out the background in photoshop.

I sketched over the top of my photographs so that I could really see how the prints would work on certain garments. The sketches were easily dropped onto my illustrations and turned into a design idea. While I was pinning the prints, I was trying to keep an anatomical connection with my concept by placing certain parts of the print over a particular part of the body to imitate it, whether it be inside or out. For example, the first black and white design below is placed so that it imitates a ribcage. Similarly the circular designs on the t-shirt are placed specifically to represent a woman's chest.
Even if the placement doesn't represent a specific body part, the actual print design itself looks like muscle, bone or cells.

I used these images to create some final design ideas for each garment, which was made really easy by the stand work process. I have realised the actual 3D visualisation of the print is extremely useful and can creat designs that I wouldn't have come up with by just working on photoshop. The only thing I would chang if I could afford it is I would use fabric rather than paper prints, as the paper didn't give any drape and often had to be ripped in order to pin it where I wanted to.