you know, when h&m and comme des garcons announced their collaboration quite a little while ago, i think i did a war victory dance. not because i’m a huge fan of h&m – i do buy some cheap basics from h&m from time to time – but because i am a die-hard comme des garcons fanatic and just the thought of being able to buy more cdg at a cheaper price was… how i imagine being on drugs must be like.

i was high.

when the day of the sale came around, i had a class at 9am. so i gave a whole bunch of money to my friend and just told him, “get what you can!! grab me that coat first! then that ruffled sleeve shirt!”

he called me shortly after 9:30, telling me the coat wasn’t even on sale at the store, and he bought me a cardigan, a scarf and the white ruffled sleeve shirt.

so i looked online on ebay. i must have saved that search and gotten the search results emailed to me for months. months! i tried bidding on it a few times, but the prices always went sky-high and i wasn’t that stupid enough to pay $600 for a coat that sold at about $350.

i had given up hope.

until several weeks ago, when a little email creeped into my inbox telling me that one of the jackets were on sale. this coat, by the way, is a toned-down version of a coat from the original comme des garcons line from several years ago. it was brilliant. and unaffordable.

perhaps because it has been some time since it was sold in the stores, and perhaps because the hype has died down, the coat was… cheap. i mean, i got it for a mighty good price! i was ecstatic!! no one else even bid on it! i almost kissed it when i took it out of the box after the postman brought it along.

swirling around and channeling my inner loie fuller

+ vintage felted hat
+ black teeshirt
+ charm necklace by sunao kuwahara
+ washed silk harem pants by RÊVASSEUR
+ coat by comme des garcons for h&m
+ studded boots by junya watanabe

yeah… i’m super happy! haha! cheap thrills hey hey hey!

Our Differences Unite Us

Edited by Fashion Pulse Daily

Coming off of Ashe Mischief’s Independent Fashion Blogger’s Post (Good Cop/Bad Cop: Participating in Links a la Mode), you all brought your A-game in posting the links a la mode — which made it extra hard to edit! This week, the theme that I saw emerging throughout the posts is one of celebrating our unique diversity; each site has a different take and approach to fashion, art, beauty, media, lifestyle, music – you name it! From the dry shampoo trials at Dramatis Personae to Le Petite Cecile’s observations regarding the bleached eyebrow trend, you all brought a new perspective to each topic at hand, a sign that indicates how wonderful and creative the blogosphere truly is. Get even more excited for Halloween with cmykaboom and Idiosyncratic Style costume suggestions that are sure to make you smile, along with DenimDebutante’s discovery of the “zipholder”. All in all, one things’ for certain: we’ve got an amazing community of bloggers!

As expected, there was a fabulous round-up of links in the forum as well, all worthy of your eyeballs!

Links à la Mode : October 29th

• Clutch 22 -A Blogger’s Fairytale – The Making of Seattle Indie Designer Jesica Milton’s “Jordie” Dress
• cmykaboom -Halloween Hauteness: Top Ten Halloween Costume Ideas
• Dramatis Personae – The Dry Shampoo Trials (Part 1)
• DenimDebutante – The Zipholder
• Fashion Pulse Daily -Favorite New Eco-Find: the Cool Indie Designer Eco Duds at Green is Black
• ferOHHHsh – To Ugg or not to Ugg?
• girl friday -A Guide to Styling & Buying Scarves.
• Idiosyncratic Style – Stylish Last Minute Halloween Ideas
• Independent Fashion Bloggers – Good Cop/Bad Cop: Participating in Links a la Mode
• Le Petite Cecile – To Bleach or not to Bleach, That’s the Question.
• Lillys Garden – Dirndlpunk ROCKS
• Mama Fashionista — So What if I’m a (Perfume) Slut?
• Prom Mafia -Warning:This Image has been Photoshopped: Should a Disclaimer be Used on Photoshopped Models?
• Oranges & Apples -Flats or High Heels? Investigating Shoes that are Both Comfortable and Stylish
• Queen Gilda: Thesis Collection: Sketching, Fabric Choices, and Final Edits
• Retro Chick -Style Snapshot – 10 Questions with Eyeliah of Style Symmetry
• The COVETED -Learning More About Vintage from The Little Guide to Vintage Shopping
• The Demoiselles – Pay Homage to the Classic Graphic T-Shirt
• Think Thru Fashion – Behind the Scenes at a MAC Halloween Photo Shoot
• Vue Society – RTW + Alterations vs. Custom Made
• Workchic – Shoe Smitten Shows Workchic Readers the Best Tall Boots for Those with Hard to Fit Calves

after all that thinking and narrowing down of the direction and inspirations i wanted to take with my thesis collection and also my market and customer, my next step was the most painful one. doing sketches and then editing them.

design croquis

well, sketches, or croquis as we call them, aren’t so bad. croquis are just different design ideas. what we try to do is to come up with several design ideas based on the inspiration, and then we do many sketches and variations of each idea until our brain screams “NO! NO MORE!” and we’ve exhausted each idea.

say for example, i think of a really interesting concept for a pocket. i can place it on pants, then i can try placing it on different skirts, or i could put it on a shirt, then put it on a coat, and try it on a sleeve, and oh wait, look it’s morphing into a hood?

sketching then colouring my croquis

some examples of my croquis

i think i did about 150 croquis during my summer break. when we got back to school at the end of august, we were told that we would be given an extra week to do even more croquis, which i thought was completely ludacris. i mean, before school even started, our brains were already fried. when i met my fashion friends back at parsons, we were all already tired by the first day of school.

it didn’t help that we had to meet kids from other departments who whined about how short summer was and how they weren’t looking forward to being back at school. uhm!??! shut up bitches!! we had actual homework, ok!?

anyway, i had left some blank spaces in between my croquis in my book, so that i could go back into them and explore my favourite ideas even further. so when i had some energy, that’s what i did.

the important thing to know, and what took me a really long time to get used to, is that one does not need to stick to any design ideas. you can love an idea so much you don’t want to part with it, but by doing so, you are making yourself blind to more ideas that could have come along, if only you were open to receiving it.

in the end, we can sew as many pieces as we want to, but we are only allotted enough time to show a maximum of 6 looks to the judges. so basically, the idea is to not be crazy and sew 20 different looks, but choose 5 or 6 looks that are really amazing, that look good together, that tell a story, and make sure it gets made really well.

fabric choices

as important as our final edits, are our fabric choices. there’s nothing worse than an amazingly designed collection that’s made out of cheap-ass polyester and scratchy wools. my collection is basically an autumn/winter collection but it includes pieces that can be worn all year round.

i have a huge fabric library at home (ok not that huge, but big enough), and i collect all sorts of fabric swatches all the time. so when i went on a hunt for materials, i really had quite a good idea of what i wanted.

i knew i didn’t want any boring black and grey collection. hell-to-the-no. (is there even such a phrase?) i love black clothes and yes i do wear black sometimes, but you very, VERY rarely see me in all black. i think i would become a depressed nun if i wore black all the time. my life is about colour, and since i was basing my collection on enid blyton’s faraway tree series (if you haven’t read my previous entry, my inspiration is based on blyton’s famous childrens book series called the faraway tree), i wanted to make sure that the collection was really bright, colourful, and energizing.

i decided to use a mix of textiles, consisting of some amazing tweeds i found, and also a lime green raw woven silk, a gorgeous and colourful plaid ikat cotton, a teal cashmere, a super soft grey cashmere-cotton mix, some other wovens as well as jersey and black suede. i even threw in a liquid metallic black spandex in the mix to give it some sheen to juxtapose all the matte tweeds. it might or might not be a good idea, but it’s going to be there for now! haha!

fabric board and colour story

when i made my colour story, i thought it would be awfully fun to name my colours after characters or places in the books. naming colours are so fun!!! don’t you think people at places like paint companies or nail polish companies, whose jobs are to name paint or polish colours, have the best jobs ever?

although i am also still currently exploring different fabric treatments, one of the last inclusions to my fabric choices was to design a type of print. over the summer, i had drawn this hot air balloon on a whim. i thought it was really cute and decided this was the perfect opportunity to develop this into a sort of print. i could have just used the whole hot air balloon itself and just printed repeats of that, but i thought it might turn out too childish (though i’d love it personally). so i just took the patterns i drew in the balloon and changed it digitally into something that could be made into a repeat and printed on fabric. what do you think? i kind of really love it! wouldn’t you wear a pair of leggings in this print!?!? (i’m so gonna make leggings.)

narrowing it down to my final edits

what i personally like to do is, i make a photocopy of all my croquis in black and white, and cut them all up. i could copy them in colour, but when i edit, i prefer not to let the their colours affect my decision. colours can be easily changed later. when i colour them in my croquis book, it is to give me an idea of how i want it to look, or what sort of fabrics i want to use. editing, to me, needs to be about the design.

this editing process itself took me about 2 weeks. everyday i would spread out all the photocopies on my table, and just sit there staring at them while i finger my fabrics. what was my original inspirations? what kind of story do i want to tell? what’s going to make an impact? which looks go together? i have too many pants, but i like how they look; how can i change this pant into a skirt?

it’s important to think about questions like this while editing. you might have an amazing design idea, but if it doesn’t go along with your other looks, then you should take a deep breath and put it away and save it for another collection. adding a look that doesn’t go with your story, will only make the collection unbalanced and will confuse the customer. this is what it means in the fashion industry when we call a collection unfocused or without a point of view.

i make a “yes” and “no” group, then keep switching my croquis between the 2 groups until i’m happy with it. and then to me, it’s important to know what my friends think.

a good designer knows who their friends are, by the way. some people are not there to help you. you do not go to ask those people for their opinions. we all have different likes and tastes, but good friends will tell you their honest feelings about what you have designed. it doesn’t matter if we have completely polar opposite design aesthetics; the fact is that we are there to help each other grow and be better at what we do.

also, although my designs belong to a niche market, it is good for me to know what others think so that i know where i stand. it’s no use for me to insist on trying to be the next avant-garde mastermind, if no one is going to buy it. good designs need to not only be interesting, but also appeal to as many different people as possible.

editing down to 6 looks isn't easy

the rejected pile of about 180 designs

final edits

i would have loved to have had another week to think about my edits, but the truth is that we all run on a deadline and when time’s up, time’s up. while this had all been going on, we have already begun sewing some samples in our methods class where the garments get made.

besides, we would be working on this collection all year. things are bound to change. so although i wanted to mull over it a little more, i stopped myself and just went ahead with it.

these are my final edits.

my in-class presentation

my final thesis edits

so there you have it! although some things might change, this is basically what i’m going to spend the rest of the year making! i’m excited. so far, we’ve made muslin samples of 3 of our looks, and i’ve been trying to perfect the fit on our fit models. but more of that story to come later.

what i want to know now is, would you wear these clothes?

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update!
ps: i had to add that even though i do have a lot of black and some neutrals in my wardrobe, i prefer to design and sketch them in colour. remember that all designs can be merchandised, like when you go to a store, you will usually find the same dress in a few different colours. if i end up selling this line one day, i will definitely make the same pieces in blues, greys and blacks too.

it is easier for a consumer to picture a colourful item in black, than for them to look at a black garment and think they prefer it in pink. likewise, when this goes before the judges, i want them to see it in colour so that it might spark something in their heads, rather than for them to just think, “oh, yet another black collection. boring.”

my next step was to think about my customer market, and also write my thesis statement. determining and narrowing down on a market is really important – knowing who my customer is will determine everything – what they are looking for when shopping for clothing, how much they are willing to spend, if they are looking for trends or if they prefer pieces to love forever, what the quality of the fabrics and finishings would be, and so on.

a lot of designers design for themselves, and i think i am no different. i know my designs do not appeal to everyone. a lot of people might say, “oh my god, i love your designs.” but all the oh-my-god-ing is not going to help pay the rent. designers only sell their designs when someone is buying them. but i know that my very small and very niche market is somewhere out there. it has to be.

who is my customer?

my customer is someone who might or might not have a job. she is between the ages of 18 to 40, or she can be a grandmother with an attitude and the personality to wear whatever she pleases. she might be a student who is a little more well-off than the average person, or someone who works part-time for extra cash just for clothes.

she might buy her clothes from boutiques or select shops, but never from snooty departmental stores with sales staff who assume she cannot afford it. she might find an incredible deal on ebay. she has a few favourite designers and is very loyal to them. She might not be able to buy an item every season, but she will come back to admire often, and when she can finally afford to treat herself, she will get her hands on one special item to love for decades.

she is someone who expresses herself through her dressing. she might have insecurities, and so she covers herself in layers of clothes. she might not be great at communicating her feelings, so she allows her clothing to speak for her each day.

she shops at specific places. in new york, she shops at comme des garcons, maison martin margiela, yohji yamamoto, seven new york, oak, and opening ceremony. but 80% of her wardrobe is from tokyo. she shops at restir, isetan shinjuku, comme des garcons, undercover, mercibeaucoup;, dog, number (n)ine, ne-net, sunao kuwahara, and the like. her favourite places to shop in this world, are in soho, chelsea, the meatpacking district, ura-harajuku, and aoyama.

she has a love for interesting, different and avant garde clothes, and accessories that will completely change an outfit or throw it overboard. she prefers to spend her money on quality items rather than mass-market trends, but is sensible enough to know that it is crazy to spend $250 on a t-shirt. (but she lets herself do it if it is an extra special one.)

my muses, my style icons

i made myself mood boards of my style icons and muses. i have several. isabella blow, lynn yaeger, and anna piaggi are especially inspiring to me. they are, in my opinion, the epitome of personal style, having the ability to inject their personalities into what they wear. ohhhh what i would give to raid their wardrobes, to steal isabella blow’s hats, to nick basically all of anna piaggi’s, well, everything, and make away with lynn yaeger’s comme des garcons frocks. but it’s not just what they own. it’s the way they wear them that makes it special.

in many ways, they are like the customer that i described in my customer profile, who expresses herself through her clothing, or perhaps used her clothes to hid a part of herself that she hated. i know i’m just assuming and it’s always convenient for one to just make a presumption, but i felt a connection with them and they are who i aspire to be one day, and who i aspire to dress.

isabella blow

anna piaggi

the all-important thesis statement

graduation day at bunka

the beginning of a design process is always tricky, and it gets even trickier when this particular collection is going to define one’s entire fashion education. i graduated in 2007 from the bunka fashion college in tokyo, japan, and transferred here to parsons in new york, where i will finally be done with my studies in may 2010.

although there were tons of seriously unnecessary classes in between that i still have to take (university liberal arts, for example, take away a year of my life at each class), graduating would mark my 5th year in plunging head-first into fashion.

looking back, it all seems really cloudy and i feel like i’ve been in a daze… or rather, a whirlwind roller-coaster ride. when i started at bunka, i knew nothing about sewing or drawing. i couldn’t sketch a human figure to save my life, let alone do fashion illustrations, where the body is usually elongated to imitate and exaggerate tall and skinny models with pin heads. plus, i was in a school where everything was taught in japanese, and although i had completed a year in studying the language, no language school was going to teach me all the technical terms that i needed to know.

the importance of good clothing contruction

i picked up everything i now know about patterning and sewing in bunka. my teachers believed that no design was good design unless it was properly constructed, and unless it was beautifully from the inside out.

this importance of construction stayed with me through the years, and perhaps it was because of this influence from bunka that i have grown to love, respect and admire rei kawakubo, junya watanabe and jun takahashi so much. if you have ever had the opportunity to wear a piece of clothing from comme des garcons or undercover, two of my favourite brands, then you will know that those aren’t just clothing; they are a piece of art. somewhere in japan, some master designer and pattern maker have constructed this amazing 3d concoction that is so intricate and complicated, and yet hugs one’s body when worn.

if there was one thing i learnt at parsons, it was how to draw. while we had weekly drawing classes at bunka, there wasn’t so much emphasis placed on it and i got by with some really basic sketching and illustration abilities. at parsons though, we had 6 hours of drawing classes a week with live models, and i really credit my first drawing teacher, mr chu, for showing me how to paint and draw the human body.

i remember all those years of me being frustrated about not being able to put my ideas onto paper. i had so many images in my head, of things i wanted to make, but i had no idea how to draw them. it was a handicap, and i felt it. with hundreds of hours of practice, i finally got the hang of it and with the ability to now illustrate my ideas, my designs have also improved along the way.

i’m tired of being a student; i must have said this a million times before. i’m a lot older than my classmates, and i’ve had experience working in the real world, which is a challenge i really enjoy. having said that, when i realised i was now a senior at school and had one last chance to really show what i’ve learnt, it was weeks of mindboggling thinking and reflection.

our summer assignment (yes, fashion students have actual summer homework while other students have their breaks) was to come up with at least 50 croquis each for 3 different collections. croquis, meaning fully coloured sketches of design ideas.

but where was i to start? i was lost. in all my previous design collections, i had always immediately come up with an idea to play with – the japanese samurai, organic architecture, decay and decomposition, and so on. i have a little notebook that i keep with me to jot down random ideas in my head that come from anywhere. i could be watching a film, reading a book, visiting a museum, going to a small town, on a bus, at an exhibition… inspirations and ideas are all around us.

but this was my senior thesis, a huge step in my life, and nothing could make me just watch some random film and base my collection on that. it needed to be something i felt; something that actually meant something.

remembering my life

so my left brain took over for a while, and i made me a mindmap. you know, of my life.

i really thought hard, to remember everything that has happened till now. i’ve 26 years of living behind me, you know? a lot has happened in 26 years. i just tried to remember all the milestones, things that really affected me, experiences that changed my life, made me smile, made me cry, made me jump up and scream “hurray!”.

i thought about different chapters that i was at during my life, and what sort of events happened in those stages that changed something in me, and about me. it was a long process that really took me a few days to really think about and reflect. it was probably the first time ever that i have really sat down and thought about my life as a whole and how everything has affected me and made me who i am today.

after writing everything down, and after going back and looking at my life – all scribbled in some mindmap, the ideas came to me. it was then that i knew what i wanted to do.

i really concentrated more on my childhood because i think it has shaped who i am today. i think 80% of who we are, is a result of our genetics, and also of our environment and how we were nurtured, especially in the earlier stages of our lives. the rest of who we are, is probably the result of subsequent experiences we’ve had.

daydreaming and imagination add some whimsy to my designs

my childhood wasn’t too shabby. i remember following my sister around everywhere, i remember playing both barbie and legos with my brother. i remember us building the hugest lego castle, and i remember giving him a mean punch when he thought it was funny to knock it all down. i remember we had a bay window in our bedroom, and we draped all sorts of blankets over the windows, tied them randomly, draped them over the backs of chairs, pulled all our sheets and pillows to the carpet and made ourselves our very own indoor tent. i remember we had some hilarious secret password to enter, that would change every 5 minutes. i remember spending hours playing and reading there.

i took piano lessons from the age of 3, and one day when i was about 4, coming back from piano class, my mom and i stopped by a bookstore and i picked up a hard-covered book that had a cute rabbit on its cover. it was the adventures of brer rabbit by enid blyton. that was my first ever enid blyton book. i don’t know what was it that made me love it so much, but i did. from that day on, i would skip over to the bookstore with 5 or 6 dollars in my hand to buy a new enid blyton book each day.

perhaps it was the way she described each scene so vividly or how she talked about fairies and gnomes, children and fairy folk going on adventures, golliwogs and naughty dolls, baked buns with cream and treacle pudding. i had no idea what treacle pudding was, by the way, but from the way enid blyton described it in her stories, i knew it had to be amazing.

my favourites books and series were about amelia jane, the famous five, shadow the sheepdog (whom my dog, shadow is named after), mr galliano’s circus, mallory towers, the naughtiest girl at school, the wishing chair, and of course, the faraway tree series.

the faraway tree is the biggest and grandest tree in the enchanted wood, that towers over all the other trees below it. all sorts of people live in the tree; there is the angry pixie who will throw something at you if you peep into his tree-window, dame wash-a-lot who pours the dirty washing from her laundry down the tree, mister watzisname who doesn’t remember his own name so people call him watzisname, the saucepan man who strings saucepans and pots all over him, moonface who has a face round like the moon, and silky the fairy with golden silky hair. the magic faraway tree has branches that spread so far and wide, it goes into a cloud at the top of the tree, where a magical land swings by each week. one day it could be the land of birthdays, or the land of giants, and the next week, it could be the land of topsy-turvy, or the land of do-as-you-please and the land of take-what-you-want. (you might have heard of these lands being mentioned in the movie v for vendetta, where v even read the faraway tree to evey).

these books were perhaps the building blocks to my creative process even today. because anything was possible in enid blyton’s books. they brought me into imaginary worlds when i was younger, and i don’t think i ever left them.

sayonara!

after using the old layout for about a year, i have decided enough was enough and that it needed to retire. so i switched things up and here it is!! a friend recommended the thesis wordpress theme and it was such a revelation! this update is still in the works, so you are going to see a lot of serious UGLY around here.

my old posts before i switched to this new layout is going to be really wonky! and my even older posts from before i made the switch to wordpress?! i don’t even wanna think about it.

the anal side of me wants to go through every post and re-adjust all the images.

the lazy side of me is telling the anal side to go to hell.

the practical side of me is telling both sides that i shouldn’t even be blogging now, considering that i’d spent the whole day doing this, and that i have a mountain of school work to get done.

damn. can i hire an intern to do this? haha.

so please bear with me while i experiment, and leave comments and suggestions if you have any! thank you!!

ps: i have so much to tell you guys about my senior thesis, but it’s gonna have to wait a few days while i get this new theme sorted!