College Major Project - A set of seamless fabric prints designed for Japanese Street fashion
For my major project, I decided create a range of six fabric designs based around the theme of “Japanese Street Fashion”. The fabrics specialised in six different styles (Decora, Cyber, Punk, Kimono and Fairy-Kei) with each design representing a different subculture that is portrayed via the fashion of Japan (specifically those in Tokyo’s Harajuku district).
To accurately achieve the looks, I did in-depth research of my chosen subcultures producing mood boards, rough design sketches and descriptions of each. I also researched the subtext of each fashion style covering music, local politics, psychology, pop culture (i.e cartoons, video games etc) and surrounding visual art that may have influenced the creation of such fashion in relation to self expression.
My final patterns were presented in the form of six 1000px by 1000px square fat quarters and are seamless in order to be production ready. To achieve this, I researched repetition in design covering areas such as geometric, tiling and shape placement in order to get a perspective of how to layout my artwork in preparation for printing. I also researched various fabric groups in order to take into account garment type, printing process and finish when finalising my designs. I completed my process using a combination of IPad Procreate software (for illustration) and desktop Affinity suite software particularly Affinity Designer as my designs will be predominantly vector based in their production.
Inspiration
In my research, I found out that despite having various interpretations, a common theme amongst the Fairy-kei style was that of magic stars with galaxy themed motifs appearing regularly in prints of the genre.
For my design, I decided to use this concept being inspired by Angelic Pretty. Here, this brand have produced an appealing print based on the shooting star motif as well as a handbag that has been popular within the Fairy-kei scene.
I wanted to put my own spin on this in my own design whilst also obtaining the “dreamworld” aesthetic found in the original.
