Graduate collection look book

Photographer – Kathryn Rattray (twisted flax)

Models – Jolene Guthrie, Joy Gansh, and Rachel McDermott

Degree show

My degree show space is all set up and ready to be assessed tomorrow morning. I will find out my results on the 20th of May, so it will be a nerve wracking time between now and then. It will be good to find out and then be able to relax! I honestly can’t believe that this is the end of my degree, it has come in so, so fast. It feels like just a few months ago that I moved to dundee from Glasgow, and now I am about to move back again.

Fourth year has definitely had it’s ups and downs. It has been both the best and worst year of my life. I actually came close to giving up, much to the dismay of my parents, but I am certainly glad I didn’t. I spent a large portion of my final semester procrastinating, which meant that the majority of my work was done in the last two months before hand in. Despite this I feel that my project came together quite well and am so very glad to be finished.

Translating designs onto the body

I have spent rather a lot of time thinking about different ways of translating my design work onto the body. Working with different scales within one outfit was an idea that I thought would balance out the multiple patterns that my garments are going to have. I also felt it would be good to have two garments that were more simple and two that were more of a statement so that fitted well with the scaling idea. Body suits have been in the back of my head for quite a while so those were what I settled on for the more understated items.

The movement of corals and other undersea foliage is a theme that I have tried to carry through my whole project so it was important for that to be present in the final outcome as well. I did a lot of research into current trends and found that some popular styles just now, which would fit in with this flowing idea, were wide leg trousers and circle skirts. I had originally settled on the skirt but changed my mind half way through the process as I felt the trousers would be more fitting.

My final, and really my main garment is a simple kimono. I have always been really interested in Japanese culture, a previous project of mine looked at the Japanese technique for mending broken ceramics – kintsukuroi. In Japan everything is reused and repurposed, with very little being thrown away. This recycling mentality is one that fits the ethos of my project quite well so that was kind of where the inspiration for the kimono came from.

I have never really done much in the way of fashion illustration, these were just quick sketches to get my ideas across to my seamstress. I also had absolutely no idea what I was doing with the measurements. They are not even all the same unit of measurement. Oops.