Fashion Collection - Jeevan
Fashion Collection - Jeevan
I joined Propel with the hope of building my skills and knowledge regarding Fashion and Design. At the start of the semester, I knew I wanted to do something related to building my fashion brand A Collective Society. After connecting with others networking in the fashion world, I felt motivated to learn how to sew. I had extraordinarily little experience with how to work a sewing machine, but I was eager to learn.
As the result of many hours and my hard work, I felt good enough to start creating actual garments. I had a very broad goal of making 8 “Runway Ready” pieces. I underestimated myself and successfully completed 12. All “1 of 1” pieces followed the theme of the collection ‘La Colle et Louvre’. After completing my fashion collection, I then released the garments for sale on both social media and my flagship website.
After completing the first portion of my project, I still had a huge chunk of time open for new possibilities. I decided to shoot a Fall/Winter promotional video for my collection. I asked a couple of my classmates to model for the video, and then proceeded to choose a location. I successfully shot, edited, and produced a 3-minute catalogue video designed to have a retro visual aesthetic.
I then used the pictures I took from the documentation of my collection and transferred them into a handheld “look book”. I designed the look book in Adobe InDesign and edited the images in Photoshop. I got in contact with Galaxy Printing Company to print out the copies. Once I received all the copies, I chose a date to release the look books and distributed the news to social media. On January 4th, I released the look books in limited quantities. 3 days later I successfully sold out all inventory.
The following video is a promotional video I filmed, edited, and produced for my collection release:
The point of the video was to inform my audience of the work that I had been doing, and to show off the garments on models. I wanted to incorporate music in the video to evoke emotion and express a feeling. I chose “Igor’s Theme” by Tyler, The Creator - an ambient drilling noise panning out of the cover art for my collection. This is then followed by drumkits and other musicals instruments to increase an anxious feeling. Throughout the remainder of the song, the video features modeling by Edyn LeDrew and myself. The first part was my “fall” portion of the collection I released; I chose this location to resemble “growth” between seasons.
The second part of my video's main purpose was to convey the theme of the collection, and the meaning behind it. Each piece within the collection resembled the shape of the Louvre (triangle) in Paris.
The third part of the video is the “winter” portion. Completing the collection, I gave the audience a perspective of my workspace here at Propel - where I worked every day to create these garments. Changing between the momentum of the music, I then decided to shoot the remaining garments for the winter collection. The location is the same, but it now has snow. The pieces were modeled by Heran Tsige and Owen Gaunt, my classmates.
There were a lot of challenges with the building and stitching of the garments. For example, when making the ‘Mineral Matter’ pants part of my Fall/Winter 2020 collection, I had loads of troubles. Cutting the wool blended fabric, with “Stage 2” shear scissors was near impossible. Luckily, I had my grandmother who is far more knowledgeable than I, help me along this roadblock. She had something called a “Rotary” cutter, which is specialized for heavy or tough fabric. I learned how to use new important tools when dealing with tough fabric. I successfully cut the fabric in the end.
Creating a garment is like a puzzle piece - once you have the pieces, you have to connect it. I had a 50-year-old ‘Singer’ sewing machine against a wool blended fabric. It was definitely not easy, but I also had to overcome that task. I had to double stich seams where only one stich would have worked. I upgraded my tolerance for time and patience. With the help of my grandmother by my side, I learned new techniques regarding the construction of a garment. For example, “serging” a garment. Serging means the cutting of raw material and stitching over the cut to leave the edges all clean. She helped when using her own sewing machine and showing me how to mock the “serger” stitch. Without even using a serger, I got the same effect and successfully understood somethign new about creating a garment.