A message about some, maybe most of you

Why not a message for all of you? Because this time, it’s about my dear women. 

Considering you are on a fashion learning platform, I guess you should get this message from a double perspective. First, as aspiring or time being designers and secondly as human beings. 

I am going to talk in this post about TACTILE, an awesome project by the Romanian designer, Adrian Oianu. 

TACTILE is a project illustrating once again the designer’s vision on femininity, which is synonymous to sensitivity, emotion, fragility, refinement and delicacy. And one can identify all these terms in his creative work: from design, to photography and fashion film. 


As Adrian Oianu reveals, his point of inspiration is the kind of woman he met in his mother, in his sister, in his friends, in those he saw walking down the street, all of them having something in common: they are all Romanian women whose femininity is totally unaggressive. 

I’d love to say that, actually, TACTILE speaks about the authentic woman all over the world. So, please, watch, feel and rediscover yourself!

Episode 1

Episode 2

What I have learned from Adrian Oianu’s project TACTILE is, first of all, the need of pursuing a dominant concept when building a collection, or maybe when building an entire creative life, and also, that besides presenting the actual designs, one should let us play with different creative media supports like photography or fashion film in order to communicate in a very inspiring way our creations to those we are making them for. 

P.S. Today, during one of the design courses he teaches, besides an awesome professional, I have also discovered a truly inspiring human being. 


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Pierre Cardin. In his fashion lives the future

“My only influence has come from space,” declares Pierre Cardin. And this is obvious, I would say, if looking at his fashion and industrial designs.

 

Evening gown with embedded hoops. 

Strapless gown in bicolor velvet, 1994

Strapless dress in gazar

Sunglasses

Winter collection 1966

Pearls neckless 

And here are some of his beautiful industrial designs:

Junior circles and Scale lamp

Neon clock


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Choosing a design school

For the hopeful design student, selecting the right program is no easy task. There are many factors that will guide your choice of school, and not all of them are as obvious as the school’s location, size and cost. In fact, many of the most crucial traits of a design program are things that won’t show up in the guidebook at all: the department’s focus, its record on placing graduates into good careers, and details about the faculty. Such details can often be learned only by visiting the school in person and conversing with faculty, and current and former students.

Click the title to find a brief guide to design education by Adam Richardson, Senior Designer in the Innovation Process Group at frog design, inc., and teaches at California College of Art.

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Behind the curtains: how and what they create at The Sruli Recht studio

The Sruli Recht studio is a small cross-discipline practice caught somewhere between product design, tailoring and shoe making. Based in Reykjavík, the studio produces one “non-product” every month from umbrellas to bulletproof scarves, tables, to belts and boots, and incorporating such materials as concrete, diamonds, skin and wool. An accessories and clothing collection is to be released annually.


In order to better understand how they create their non-conventional designs inside their non-conventional studio, just look at the requirements they have for the fashion design internship: 

This hands-on position calls for candidates with a high level of inventiveness and technical aptitude. This placement is offered to students or graduates with a background in Fashion Design.

Skill requirements:

  • an ability to use scissors
  • a working knowledge of CS Suite
  • a knowledge of pattern cutting and sewing
  • hands-on mentality
  • strong Communication and organizational skills
  • fluency in English

Here’s an insightful video about what their studio looks like. 

And two more lovely objects they create - a box and a ring:


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Porcelain clothing sculptures

I love interdisciplinarity. It involves research in the goal of connecting and integrating several academic schools of thought, professions, or technologies. More than that, it also applies a lot in the initial step when artists “gather” inspiration. 

We’ve been talking a lot on this blog about the important role of inspiration when creating, about how inspiration from different areas applies in fashion. Now I’m presenting a nice example of how fashion inspires artists practicing other kind of arts.

That is, LACOSTE challenged Chinese artist Li Xiaofeng to create two different polos for the 2010 Holiday Collector’s Series. 

photo (c) Miko He

photo (c) Miko He

photo (c) LACOSTE

Li Xiaofengtrained as a muralist but turned to sculpture to explore a new concept and expression of Chinese landscapes. His choice of material is unexpected; instead of marble, wood or even glass, he  prefers buying shards of broken porcelain recovered from ancient archeological digs, some dating from the Ming Dynasty, and then shaping and polishing them, drilling holes into each corner and linking them together with silver wire to create ’rearranged landscapes’.

Here are some of his other fashion inspired works:


photo (c) Miko He

And this is how the artist describes the steps to make his porcelain clothing sculptures:

Firstly, composing the piece is a process. I must reflect a lot about it. I must make a rough sketch, compose, reject it and start again. Sometimes, I straightaway use Plasticene or wire to create a model. After this, after confirming the period of the shards, I classify the colour of the patterns, then put together a rough arrangement of the shards, cut and polish each piece. This is a very repetitive process. I must pay close attention to the modelling as well as the original pattern colour of the shards. I then must weld the pieces and make the final adjustments.


photo (c) Miko He

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The New Opulence in Fashion

During the last decade, minimalism was the aesthetics guiding not only fashion but also architecture, industrial design, fragrance, beauty, packaging. 

More and more, editorials in fashion media, works of talented photographs and designers show another trend in aesthetics. I call it the new opulence. And I like it. It is colorful and full of details, but in a way that manages to keep a certain simplicity. These works suggest me a complicated ecosystem in the inside, but a clean and plain universe in the outside. 

As an example I chose the works of Elias Wessel:

and Troyt Coburn:

Stay inspired and create beauty, my dear readers!

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