Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Fashion or Garment Construction/Assembly

Most of us tend to be highly influenced by "Fashion" etc.

I need to ask some of you out there what you're influenced by; "Fashion and it's idea" or the actual process of "construction and garment assembly"? Please enlighten me because for a while now, people haven't really noticed the latter.

From personal experiences at Fashion School in New York, the class was most definitely divided into two different schools of thought and you could categorize people as soon as they walked into the studios. I'm reminiscing. All this happened about 6 years ago so it's slightly hazy.

Strangely so, it was easy to spot the people who were more interested in the "idea" than in the actual process. Most of the people that signed up to be part of the "idea" dropped out within six weeks or headed right into depression after the 3rd day. It was a humorous sight that'll always remain as a firm reminder for the rest of my production days.

The idea of this post is to ask what you guys are thinking. Are we moving into greater appreciation for construction, quality? With the ascent of Menswear at the moment, we're now lucky enough to really see great clothing that is focusing less on the "idea" but rather on the actual garment, the styling and the people the garments resonate with. Are you happy with this?

As far as I know, the situation in this city is one that is currently still behind the international circuit. We're still in the midst of embracing the "idea" when we hear of an event or launch happening. We're enamored by the parties, the overly stylish yet seemingly uninteresting attendees and the desire to really be noticed. Seems like we're not actually promoting or cultivating a great design scene but rather just a "scene". This is what makes this city really interesting to me because in the not so distant future, we're probably going to be laughing at this phase and thinking about how strange we all looked.

I did a couple of gigs with CJ at a local college for design and in those discussions we always tried to promote the idea of fashion as a whole and not just the good bits. Are you interested in making a "good" shirt first or are you dead set on making a shirt that looks really cool? We posed that question continuously and hoped to the powers above that we'd get people interested in the first half of that question.

So what are you? What do you peoples think?

I'll leave you guys with a really good article on some of the types of people we relate with. Get it here.

"Yet interestingly enough, fashion is not a word that inspires Adeline. “I don’t like this word, fashion,” she confides. “There are two things for me. There are clothes, and there is fashion. Fashion – it’s trends, money, industry, and companies. On the other side you have clothes – construction, fabrics, and people who want to know about clothes. How we make clothes, how we wear them, how we feel in them. It’s my way to see the clothing, the exchange between my customers and I”.