Fashion

For fashion week we had to create an environmental disaster for which we had to create a body adornment to be able to survive the conditions we had created. My made up disaster was that dragons had been frozen from the ice caps and scientists wanted to breed them, this caused chaos so now dragons rule the earth. Conditions are hot, hard to grow crops and the air is hard to breath (due to carbon monoxide from burning and just general ash in the atmosphere). I designed quite a few garments, being inspired from Steam Punk fashion at first, but then slowly I began to create my own drawing style and designed a coat with a mask to protect the eyes from ash and had a gas mask to help breathing outside when collecting crops.

(Drawing of my design)

Due to the limited amount of time, I decided to only make the head piece, seeing as it was the part with the most detail and seemed most interesting to make. However, there was one problem, that the more I started to create it, the more it looked like a horror mask! (seemed fitting at the time as it was coming up to the weekend of Halloween). This wasn't my intention, but it turned out that way and didn't have time to make another one.

(Me in the mask I created)

Our task over the weekend was then to take fashion photographs of the garment we had created. I wasn't very pleased with the outcome of my adornment, but I was determined to make it look good with the photography task. As I live near some woods I went down with my friend (Holly) to model my own mask. I still dressed in a remote Steam Punk style (corset, shirt, boots etc...) to add style to the mask and set out to take pictures. Once they were taken I edited them on Photoshop CS5, lowered the saturation to add an ash/burnt effect to the landscape. I also added an orange and red gradient across the image to add a warm/hot fire element to the whole picture. Here are some of the best outcomes (I think):

  

I really like these outcomes and I much prefer the mask when it's in these pictures. Perhaps because i added more style and a matching setting which helped the mask look less horrific. I really enjoyed fashion week, but I'm afraid my sewing skills aren't quite up to scratch. This wouldn't stop me from doing fashion and textiles, I just preferred doing the photography part rather than making the garment. Which makes me lean more towards the Visual Communication pathway which was what I wanted to go into in the first place.