Fashion Thinking

Creative Approaches to the Design Process

Fiona Dieffenbacher

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350195974
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Fashion's great innovations often spring from inspired designers developing unique concepts and challenging the status quo. But how do they do it? To find out, follow ten exceptional fashion design students as they respond to a brief, exploring their diverse strategies and the thinking behind their final collections. This second edition of Fashion Thinking features six new interviews, with insight from the director of Open Style Lab, Grace Jun, and Yeohlee Teng, whose designs have earned a permanent place in the Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. There are also four new case studies, incorporating new technology including adaptive design for the visually impaired and the use of augmented reality. Beautifully illustrated and structured to clearly demonstrate how to take ideas from concept to design, Fashion Thinking demystifies the creative thinking process to help you develop your own unique collection.

1

PRACTICE

Hope for the Future
by Janelle Abbott

Janelle Abbott was born into the fashion industry – her parents owned a clothing manufacturing company, Amanda Gray. In 2012, she pursued a BFA in fashion design at Parsons School of Design. Concerned about the ethical failure/ecological damage caused by the industry, Janelle decided to focus on upcycling, sustainability, hand craft, and zero-waste patterns. Parsons’ professor, Timo Rissanen, and collaborator Salla Salin employed Janelle to sew white T-shirts in Helsinki’s Amos Anderson Museum as a part of their installation ‘15 Percent’ – the typical amount wasted from traditional patternmaking. In 2012, Janelle began FEMAIL – a ‘reactive collaboration’ with Camilla Carper. The duo mail work back and forth to create one-of-a-kind clothing and art together, yet from afar. Their work has been featured in Nylon, Interview Magazine and the Bellevue Arts Museum (‘AMPM 2.0’, 2018). Janelle also creates clothing and art solo as JRAT, and in 2019 she performed live zero-waste draping and sewing at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry. Janelle currently works as a chair weaver/assistant to Seattle artist Del Webber.

PHASE I: IDEA GENERATION

PROCESS LIST

» Brainstorming

» Mind Mapping

» Music/Dance

» Mark-making

» Automatic painting

» Visual vocabulary

» Photo-documentation

» Video

» Draping

» Doodling

» Observation

» Note-taking

CONTEXT: Where did the idea come from?

In Janelle’s final year at Parsons School of Design, the students were challenged to practice mind mapping to develop their initial ideas for a ten to fifteen look collection.

The mind-mapping process starts with a small sample of collected inspiration. The source is then pondered and documented via whatever medium the designer chooses, be it written word, a series of drawings, collages, or so on. The initial source point ‘a’ should then lead to further ideas of ‘b, c, d, and e’ and eventually bring one to their destination point of self-revelation, enlightenment and true inspiration – a point at which the design process is fully ready to begin.

Janelle’s project began when the faculty played a song in class then instructed the students to create a mind map to reflect the music. This was a simple exercise to ignite within each of them an idea that would direct their own individual mind-mapping process.

For Janelle, she was initially more interested in connecting the action of dancing to drawing than in designing clothing. But as the work progressed, it became increasingly clear how this chain of practices – dance, drawing, fashion – worked together in a shared understanding of motion. From her initial idea, Janelle had identified the overarching theme that would inform her process.

Figure 1.1

“Hope for the future” reference book

The method of mind mapping pushed Janelle beyond prescribed conceptions and notions. Beginning from an outside-in perspective, her process of investigation in the realms of music, dance and drawing provided questioning points that informed how she approached fashion design and clothing in a new way. Janelle’s idea took shape almost immediately.

Janelle’s lifelong relationship with dance provided the starting point for this project. She took classes throughout her youth, and it was a love-hate relationship from the start. After moving to New York City and enrolling at Parsons, Janelle abandoned dance as a formal practice. However, she continued performing for her camera in various classrooms on campus.

Inspired by a faculty who was interested in the connections to be made between drawing and dance, she began to investigate this concept further. It was a practice she kept for herself as she explains, ‘You can detach yourself from consciousness in a way that is difficult to replicate through any other means – the beauty that I found in dance was that though I had put to rest the small portion of my mind that was conscious, the remaining portion was allowed the opportunity to ignite.’

Janelle began to make new connections within the context of dance and fashion that drove her conceptually. She reflects: ‘Experience and a desire to disconnect from “here” and reconnect with “now”, to revive the flattened “body” of fashion, to move, activate, engage: it is from these places that the concept was spurred.’

Her first step in the creative process for this project began with her listening to Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Impossible Soul’. Its twenty-five minutes of playtime gave her the opportunity to become immersed in the atmosphere created by the song. Using black and white acrylics on mint paper, she began to paint in response to the music. The series of paintings were a chaotic mash, but Janelle identified four particular actions, initiated by the music, that she then catalogued and assembled into a reference book, which accompanied her to the next part of her process.

Figures 1.2 and 1.3

Brush Strokes

Janelle used brush strokes to make connections between the acts of drawing and dancing. These would later be used to inform the silhouette, form and surfance design of her collection.

A few days later she played the soundtrack again and began investigating the brush strokes one by one; drawing them on a board in chalk, then dancing to the song in a manner that mimicked each stroke, first wearing restrictive clothing, then a second time with oversized ‘flowing’ clothing.

Using a personal experience to inform the design process provides authenticity that leads to original concepts, which have ownership from the beginning. By bringing dance into the context of design, Janelle allowed this to impact the disciplines of drawing and fashion in new ways and created a new personal approach to design itself.

Janelle videoed herself throughout the initial process and began utilizing stills from the videos to create drapes based on how the captured clothing looked. Her goal was to create clothing that looked as if it was in motion while remaining static on the body.

Figure 1.4

Translation of brush strokes into dance movements.

Figure 1.5

Sequence of stills of Janelle dancing and selection of key movements that would later inform her design process.

EXPLORE: Moving ideas forward

Between the development stages above, Janelle also began to drape 3D shapes in heavy weight wool, working on a process of doubling fabric back on itself, mimicking the various components of her initial brush strokes. She was searching for a way to connect drawing more directly to fashion, through the lens of dance without explicitly referencing the action. She wanted the fabric to dance across the dress form in the same manner that one can dance across a dance floor (or an empty classroom, in her case).

Janelle describes the process as follows:

The drapes that I developed were apart from the initial concept, but at the same time in tune with its sentiment, because they sought to capture movement in motion. The weight of the wool retained shapes as I rolled the fabric diagonally and horizontally across the dress form, creating ripples and recessions like the imprint of waves on sand. I photographed this series and used several of the drapes later to develop my final sket...