The day of the final presentation to Next. My group were extremely dedicated this week and fully supportive of one another. I took it upon myself to make sure that we prioritised all aspects, ready for the presentation. This meant that the team had to prioritise the look book and portfolio pages over market research and anything extra. Luckily, over christmas I had completed all of my market research, colour specification drawings and my portfolio pages. Therefore, that meant that I was able to alter any pages after seeing Ally and then support the rest of the group.
During the Christmas break I thought about how we could present our work to Next. I came up with the idea of creating a personalised briefcase with the lining, and our brand embossed on the front of it. My group loved this idea so while the rest of my group were continuing with their colour specifications and portfolio work, I went out to find a suitable briefcase to start putting it together. In addition to this, I also thought of the criminal cover file design for the look book, therefore I created this sleeve ready for the presentation. Once the rest of my team had finished making final adjustments to their black and white flat specification drawings, colour specifications and final illustrations, I began laying it out to help them, ready for the presentation. My group rehearsed the presentation Sunday and Monday morning, to make sure that we were fully prepared for the day. Luckily, our presentation didn't start until 3:30 that day, so that meant that we ha a bit of time in the morning to print off presentation boards and rehearse. The presentation went extremely well and my group delivered all the information effectively. I was extremely nervous prior to the presentation, but found confidence in myself to deliver my sections enthusiastically to the Next representatives. They loved our projected and gave us some really good feedback. They loved all the extra effort we had put in such as the briefcase, lookbook cover and thought that the whole concept itself flowed consistently throughout which he said he hadn't yet seen and knows how difficult it is to do that within a group. The group was so happy with the feedback and we all felt a sense of relief that all our hard work had paid off.
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After our long Christmas Break, myself and my team reunited on Monday which was the day of the 3D hand in. All members in my team managed to hand in all their garments on time and it was very pleasing to see our collection all together, as it was the first time we had seen all our garments together. Over Christmas, I focused on updating sketchbook pages and completing all areas the market research that I had been allocated. On Monday, We also carried out the photoshoot. I organised finding a location to carry out the photoshoot. This proved very difficult as many emails and calls had to be made, as well as arranging a date that fitted for the venue, models and photographer. I
The photoshoot was taken at The Orange Tree pub and as a team we were very happy with the outcome. The next day we received the images from our photographer and started putting together the look book. Myself, Lola and Dana took it upon ourselves to lay out the look book pages and create them. I also came up with the idea of making the cover of the book look like a criminal case file, as it felt it fitted well with the gangster, criminal concept. I took it upon myself to create the sleeve also, I added polaroid mugshots, fake blood and our logo onto it as well. I was very pleased with the outcome of the look book as it took us three days to make it and it looked really effective. The final week before Christmas has been extremely hectic. Our main focus has been completing our garments. The fabric we have purchased for my suit jacket and waistcoat has been a nightmare to stitch. We initially felt very confident in the quality of the fabric, as it was purchased form Berwick Cloth Shop in London. However, when we rolled the fabric out, we found that the checks were not in fact straight. After speaking to the technicians for advice, the came to the assumption that because the fabric is similar to a crepe, that it must have stretched on the roller in the factory. This was an incredible shame as it has compromised the perfection of the jacket, however, I have tried my very best to pattern match the fabric during the pattern cutting an manufacturing process. The initial timeframe I had given myself to complete the tailored jacket, waistcoat and jersey was two weeks. However, this was not achieved due to the difficulty of the checked pattern. It in fact took me two whole days to fuse all pieces of the waistcoat and jacket, and also cut the fabric out. This meant that I had to spend three extra days finishing my jacket and jersey, however it was worth it in the end as the final outcome looks very professional. During the manufacturing, I decided to start with the waistcoat as I soon realised I was going to find it very difficult sewing the lines straight with the fabric being distorted. My time plan was practically thrown out the window, as it took me several attempts to sew the darts into the waistcoat and figure out a method the get the lines running straight through the seams. I had tried every method possible such as pinning each line, that didn’t work as the fabric kept moving under the foot of the sewing machine. I also tried tacking each line to make sure they matched evenly. That still proved to be unsuccessful as once the fabric went through the machine, it still moved the two layers. I even tried back tacking each line together an then sewing through the whole line but that still didn’t work!
In the end, I figured that whilst I'm sewing the machine, that if I place the top layer line just above the layer below, that when they are sewn under the foot, the foot will then push them together perfectly. This was extremely time consuming, therefore in the end it took me three whole days to complete the waistcoat. Due to unplanned issues with my fabric, it meant that I had to stay in Nottingham until the 19th of December to get my suit jacket and jersey completed. I'm glad that I took the time to stay back and get it finished, rather the rushing the garments so that I could go home sooner. I found the fabric very challenging, and as I m a perfection, I was determined to sewing the jacket and waistcoat as best as I could. Overall, I am extremely happy with outcome of all my garments and feel very proud. The feedback we received from our presentation was fair and as a team, we now know what we need to improve on, ready for making our final garments and purchasing our final fabrics.
The compliments we received included, sound presentation, intelligent progression of design thinking, sound market and primary customer research, solid body of 3D sampling, good colour palette, interesting opulent fabric choices, well presented boards, considered and had visual impact. Another thing the industry liked was the name Bloomin' Gents. they said that it was really catchy and clever. I came up with the name Bloomin' Gents as it has several different meanings within the concept. The first one being the obvious one that these young boys are 'blooming' into gentlemen. Another one being the word blooming which references the flowers and florals that we want to incorporate into the print. Finally, because of the era we have based our concept around, you can imagine passers by witnessing teddy Boys getting into trouble and commenting, 'Oh it's those Bloomin' Gents again'. Overall we were thrilled with the feedback and felt that we came together as a team to produce a really professional presentation. The improvements consisted of the following, overall they felt the presentation lacked passion and enthusiasm, the name Rosy Ted for the concept store name was too similar to Ted Baker, more research is needed on teddy Boys to pull out aspects to incorporate in our designs, add in new and exciting design features, rose emblem needs changing as it is too similar to the rugby rose, floral print needs working on to make something hidden, humorous and quirky, take more consideration in the application of knitted samples. As a team, we fully agree and all critique and understand all the refinement that needs to be made within the project. We discussed all these changes with David in our tutorial this week, as well as considering final fabrics with him and whether he felt all the fabric types and weights would be suitable for each garment. David has asked us to start purchasing our fabrics and we have suggested various changes that we have thought about, such as incorporating thorns from a rose to our concept to tie in the feminine aspect, but taking the more hard edge aspect of a flower to keep the concept more rough and masculine, rather than too feminine as that isn't the style we want. For the rest of this week, we will continue to focus on developing our toiles and in the evenings the team has decided to focus on working on the print development and logo design. Responding to feedback last week, our tutor said that we need to work on our sketchbook as it was lacking in content. Although our concept may be strong, this isn’t effectively reflected in our sketchbook which all the team agree on. To correct this, I took it upon myself on behalf of the team to visit Nottingham Contemporary’s current exhibition on feminism. From this, I was hoping to find artwork relevant to our mother and son/ mother being the rock in the family household to make our concept even stronger. Prior to the visit, I also researched into some poems relating to the mother and son bond from a mothers perspective which I feel will really help push this section of the idea. The rest of the group this week were working on linking in each section of our idea into the sketchbook and as a team we have accomplished so much this week. I have also participated in the sketchbook and have also created some rough knitting samples which I would like to develop further. As a group, we also visited London for the day to go fabric sourcing. I thoroughly enjoyed the day and we worked really effectively as a team by pre planning our journey before the day to make sure we used the most of our time effectively. We split up into two groups in Soho and then travelled to shepherds bush together and tackled each side of the street in two groups. At the end of the tiring day we met up for a coffee and discussed what swatches we had collected and our ideas behind which outfit would work with which outfit. Overall, I am really happy with the team as we all understand our concept really well and are able to spark and combine great ideas off of one another. This weekend, I have also started designing the flat specification drawings on Illustrator. It was advised that only one person in the team should complete this so that the style is consistent. Therefore I have volunteered myself to complete this task on behalf of the team.
We have also planned what tasks each of us will be completing this week in order to finish everything, ready for the mid project presentation on Thursday. I have been tasked to complete the spec drawings, help Dana with the six piece collection illustrations and also complete a variety of knitting samples. The whole group also need to put together a muse and complete final toiles for us to show to the Next representatives. As a team, we thought that this week it was important for us to start creating rough silhouette pieces and adapting our toiles. We started with outer coats and jackets as these are the most essential pieces to the outfits. We then assigned individual specific garments to focus on so that we could get more toiles completed soon.
The week after, we felt that our outer jacket toiles were starting to come together, so we then decided to focus on altering the trousers, as we felt this area had now become our weakest area and that is was best to start the shaping and altering of the trousers as well. We have decided that we are going to have four different trouser fittings. One will be a straight leg jean with rolled up hems to style, high waisted cropped trousers, a baggy trouser shape, and a traditional tailored suit trousers to be paired with the three piece suit. We are now starting to build a strong collection of toiles that now need to be finalised. However, we are aware that we have a lot of other work to be focusing on leading up to the mid project presentation, therefore we are going to be focusing on design development and choosing our six piece collection illustrations, as well as the market research, sketchbook, sampling, concept store and muse. After starting back into my second year at Nottingham Trent University, we were immediately introduced into our new groups and giving the task to undergo menswear market research. The brief asked us to conduct intense research into the current trends in menswear, details on the fit, cut, construction, detailing on cuffs, collars, closures, button sizes and the finishing's on garments. As a group, we collected all of our summer work together and discussed our findings to choose sections we thought fitted the brief well. We then assigned each team member a specific garment type to research into e.g. trousers, casual coats, trousers. There were five topics and six members in our group, therefore I took it upon myself to take note of specific ways each garment is being styled through online shopping sites, in store and fashion figures through music and Instagram. As a team, for our fist project I felt that we all worked effectively as a team and we all pitched in ideas and came to simultaneous decisions very easily. Also, I felt our overall style of the presentation worked really well and looked consistent throughout as we each worked on our own pages. We achieved this through picking a few inspirational portfolio pages on Pinterest to be inspired by. This idea worked really well and is definitely something I think we should consider doing for our sketchbook, portfolio and market research layouts. Overall, the feedback given was very positive and the three tutors thought we had covered a good proportion of the brief and assessed interesting points within menswear fashion that we could take forward into our main group project. From the presentation, our team has acted upon the feedback and also re-written points made within the presentation onto printed sheets from the PowerPoint.
This week my group and I had project and industry briefs. We found out that our live project brand that we will be working alongside is Next, which we were thoroughly excited by. The brief consists of creating a capsule collection for autumn winter, and we will be making four out of six from the line up. We started the research by building market research around Next and finding their style and aspirations. We felt that Next’s menswear clothing portrays a traditional yet modern British man. This is through their Harris tweed and luxurious fabrics, to their classic trouser styles and knitwear range. They are on trend, yet have a Ted Baker, Hugo Boss feel to their range. Overall it is very mature and classic. We also carried out a questionnaire within the store and found that overall customers wanted to see a range of clothes suited to the younger, maturing adult customer base. For this reason, we decided to aim our target market around this younger customer base. To move forward with the research, half of the group focused on delving into the market research, whilst the other half began concept research that was relevant to our recent findings. By the end of this week we all arrange a meeting together to brainstorm our ideas together and come up with an ongoing concept, ready to discuss within our weekly tutorials. The beginning of next week we focused on our concept and trying to finalise it with merging our strongest ideas together. Through my research, we decided that we want to go for a Peaky Blinders, 1920’s style along with the 1950’s Teddy Boy gangster. We feel that these two eras work together because they are both looking at hard faced gangsters and rebels. Their styles are also built upon tailored silhouettes. To make this idea more interesting and our own, we re going to add a feminine touch to the look by using florals and feminine colours. The idea has come from my thoughts about showing reference to the journey of a boy becoming a man (who are target market is) and how mothers and sons hold a very special bond where the mother finds it hard to cut the ties with their young sons. To show influence of the mother in this collection, we are going to be using handmade knitting samples as decoration. This also fits in with the era of the project as mothers were known for mending lots of clothes and adding their love in clothing, instead of buying replacement pieces.
To bring in the floral aspect of our concept, our team member Miranda visited an installation in Japan over the summer, Which was filled with beautiful floral and soft lighting interactive displays which looked incredible. The images she took were so vibrant and fitted perfectly with our feminine idea. We would like to experiment with the images and aim to make prints out of the photographs. From the image above, which shows all our ideas together, we have now been able to finalise it to our current concept. Our tutor was extremely happy with our idea and we have now begun putting together our sketchbook. SUMMER.
Over the summer, I had lots of fun events with friends from music festivals such as Tramlines and Leeds festival, to evenings out enjoying the summers evenings and catching up with childhood friends. Towards the end of summer I began to realise how long summer holidays at university really are and decided it was time to gain some experience that will help me pursue my future career plans. Towards the end of August I started volunteering at my local Sue Ryder store back home. The exceptional support that the company provide to care for patients and families facing such frightening, life-changing diagnosis’ is incredible. I also often purchase items from Sue Ryder, especially clothing due to my environmental beliefs. Therefore, I thought it would be a great opportunity to help the charity, whilst learning important retail skills such as pricing and labelling items, stock replenishment, stock merchandising and visual merchandising e.g. window displays and assisting with the summer through store layouts and re-pricing items. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Sue Ryder and felt part of the team as the staff were extremely friendly and welcoming. Overall I spent four days a week there for a month and completed over sixty hours of volunteering work there. I will definitely consider returning back to the store next summer to help the charity. After being at Sue Ryder, I knew that I was ready for returning back to Nottingham to give myself time to settle back into uni, independent life since my first year was a pretty hectic start of meeting new friends and getting to terms with the course procedures and ways of working. On September the 11th my family helped me move all my belongings into my new flat that I’m sharing with my two friends from the Fashion Design course. I had three weeks before second year started, therefore I used my time wisely and improved my CV and did some research into volunteering opportunities I can take advantage of whilst on the course. |
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