Im currently in the research stage of my project, where I am looking into different eras of fashion and language. I want to briefly look into all of these eras so that I can then mainly focus on one or two for my project. So far I think I will be focusing into the 1900's-1910's as I feel that this era has the biggest potential to be developed within and to reinvent the garments to make them desirable to modern day women.

The Journey of Language

The Journey of Language.

Review:

Having no barriers within my creativity, allowing my mind to wander and drift beyond all sense of normality, experimenting with techniques and patterns so unique to myself, have allowed me to progress through this foundation year. I have found the beauty of working directly onto the stand, and one day projects have pushed me to let down my barriers and work at a face pace. Life drawing has made me appreciate smaller details and how everything comes down to just being basic shape, proportion and colour.

I can now accurately recognize the strengths and weaknesses in my work, my stronger side being the making, working straight onto the mannequin. However, I now know and understand how my analysis and explanations of my own thoughts could be much clearer a well as being presented better.

These last few months of learning, experimenting and purely playing within my chosen area, has lead me to firmly decided that I want my unit 7 project to be based around fashion and costume.

Concept:

My intentions for unit 7 are to research into different types and styles of typography and language. My main aims are to look into how language has changed over the years alongside fashion trends around the same era, how some have become obsolete and the different popularity of languages. I will also be focusing on typography and text, how it has developed within language and the social standards that we have in this day and age.

I will also research ancient language and manuscripts, researching new word trends and obsolete words and phrases. I will go to library’s and museums to find primary evidence of ancient manuscripts and hand rendered books. I want evidence of how language and text has changed through society’s standards as well as major life and world changing events. I will be creating questionnaires to primarily discover facts about what my peers see as a fashion trend right now, and how trends from different eras can come back around to be reinvented into something new.

Another aspect I am intending to research into is how fashion trends run alongside word and typography trends. When looking back into how language was spoken and used 80 years ago in comparison to the main garment trends and necessities in the same era.

In order to link all of my research and findings with fashion and costume, I will be research. I of course will be utilizing all of the resources available to me, such as; Library’s, museums, darkrooms, print rooms, sewing machines, welding stations, laser printers, the internet and many more available to me. My main anticipated outcome will be a collection, or one final garment that will accurately represent my chosen theme and for my final show to reflect my whole body of work.

Evaluation:

My fashion illustrations will give me a platform to quickly and efficiently experiment with my ideas and through processes, and sketchbooks will allow me to have the opportunity to explain myself and ideas, how they all link together to create one final outcome. I am going to surpass all boundaries and barriers, pushing myself to create a body of work that fully represents the height of my ability at this point in my life and career. I will constantly reflect upon my successes and failures. There will possibly be a lot of change and adaptations within this unit; therefore I am going to be leaving room for this change. I will be keeping track of all feedback and ideas in order to allow myself to reach my full potential within this project.

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Nicole Hofgartner

Bibliography:

The metropolitan museum

http://www.batharchives.co.uk/
Bath Fashion museum

Cardiff Central Library

Vintage Fashion and Couture book by Kerry Taylor
DK Fashion; The ultimate book of costume and style

Gloucestershire University

I have been offered an unconditional place at Gloucestershire University to study fashion design. This  is my first choice in university and I am hoping to be moving up there in September 2016. This is such a wonderful opportunity for me and I am hoping to fully embrace all of the opportunity that it could throw my way.

Flight

After coming back from the christmas break, we have started term two with a project based around flight. This project is very open and we can base it around our own interpretation of the word flight.

I wanted to avoid the obvious themes of flight such as birds, planes and feathers. Instead I am basing my project around 1900's transport such as hit air balloons, trains, cars, bikes, horse and carriages. I came to thinking of wanting to do this from the film 'The Great and Powerful Oz', in the very beginning scenes of the film when they are in Kansas, the setting is a circus. What made me think of this was the tornado which carried oz to Munchkin land, their flight in the tornado, however, I am going to be taking inspiration from the era and the hit air balloon which carried oz into the Munchkin land.

I do feel as if I will really enjoy this project, I can see a lot of potential designs and pathways that I could take this project with.

Fashion and Surface Design -

We have been given architecture to focus on for our fashion and surface design project. As soon as I found out what our project brief was, I immediately went onto Pintrest to search for garments and inspiration for this project. When I was on Pintrest I came across this page which purely shows white architectural objects and buildings. The pure colour scheme and the plain, yet intriguing look interested me. From there, I decided to look for pastel and white architecture, which is when I came across Russell house in Covent gardens in London.

While i was drawing up my sketches and ideas, i realised that i was going more towards fashion rather than surface design, which then lead me to do fashion illustrations of dresses and light flowing garments, which were all in pastel colours. However, i found that in most of my research the buildings and architectural objects had all had straight, flat edges, so I decided to try and incorporate this into the floaty garments.

I have also decided that I am going to be using a screen print technique in my final garment. In order to get the clean cut edges of the skyline and buildings that I wanted, screen printing would be the safest option. I can then paint over the screen print over the screen print by hand once it is dried to finish the final look of the garment.

Photomedia

I have now all finished my photomedia project! I did really enjoy this project and I feel as if my work has already improved from the first project that we did. I used photoshop to manipulate photographs that I had taken in the studio, cutting away the faces of the subjects in the photographs and replacing them with scenic images. I do feel as if this really portrayed my idea of rapprochement as it shows the harmonious relations between people and nature. Also by cutting away the faces of the subjects in the photograph, it gives them no identity, a clean slate, it makes them new.

Photomedia - Rapprochement

This week we were given new projects, for this particular one in photo media, we were given a dictionary  in which we had to pick a word at random to base our project around. My word was 'Rapprochement'! As I didn't know much about this word my first step was to find the definition, which happened to be 'an establishment or resumption of harmonious relations'. My initial thoughts when I first read this were identities and relationships. It was about people, countries, things coming together and being combined to one.

Within this project I would like to really portray rapprochement through people and their identities, making them into something new.