[MoonStar]

Salaam,

this thread is about fashion design as a creative process. Talk about clothes you're working on/designing/what inspires you/anything related to creating fashion. This thread is not about where you like to shop, create a Girltalk:Style and Substance thread for that.

[MoonStar]

A local library has a lot of books about various designers, so I read one about Oleg Cassini, who designed Jackie Kennedy's clothes during JFK's presidency. It's really interesting, written by him with lots of photos of her. She wore his designs only, and he created a new look just for her, rather than her wearing the latest designs from various top designers. His designs for her were very simple with few embellishments, and yet they looked really classy. His staff for her included a tailor, a color and material specialist, 8 seamstresses, and another staff designer. 3 mannequins with her exact measurements and a live model in her size as well.

I really liked his skirt/suits, coats, and dailywear dress designs, but I didn't like his evening gowns that much, they looked too stiff.

A Thousand Days of Magic: Dressing Jacqueline Kennedy for the White House, by Oleg Cassini, 1995.

"During the thousand days of the Kennedy administration, Cassini designed over 300 outfits for Jackie Kennedy - coats, dresses, evening gowns, suits and day wear. He coordinated every aspect of her wardrobe, from shoes and hats to gloves and handbags. In this book, for the first time, he offers a fascinating and comprehensive view of his role as Jackie's personal couturier."

[MoonStar]

So I went to Joann Fabrics and got some cotton fabric for a summer shirt. Joanns has good fancy fabrics for lenghas and skirts but their cottons are quilting cottons and calico prints, but I'm looking for thinner cottons with different prints, but I need some long shirts so this'll do for now. I got a beige and light blue scrolly print and some light blue fabric for accents (on the sleeves, hem, and around the waist, kimono-eque but no tie in the back). The fabrics cost $8, 1.5 yards of the print, 3/4 yard of the solid.

[MoonStar]

So I made a rough sketch and have a design in mind. Simple tunic shape, I'll use the pattern from my previous shirt, straight sleeve that flares a tiny bit, square neckline. I tried a square neck on a previous shirt and it came out messy, the facing was lumpy, I'll take a look at one on my mom's kameezes and make it on bias this time. This fabric is a slightly stiff cotton so it should be easier to sew. I'm going to use the solid light blue fabric as 3" wide bands on the ends of the sleeves, at the bottom hem of the shirt, and at the waist, slightly higher than the natural waistline. (though that might be a pain since I'll have to chop the shirt in two to insert that.) I'll make a simple bow from the same fabric and attach that at center of the waistband if it comes out good, and I have some white/light blue trim, it looks like a chain of flat white rosettes, I might add that on the center of the bands.

[MoonStar]

Haven't started the shirt yet but working on the pink fleece robe I started awhile back, sewed on the trim, sewed the front and back together. I haven't sewed heavy fabrics on my home machine before, I used the needle for thicker fabrics but it still sounded like I was sewing rocks, sounded like something was jamming. I tried varying the stitch length but it still sounded bumpy. It sewed it fine though so hopefully I won't kill my machine in the process.

The patch pockets will be sewn on by hand last. Still thinking about the buttons. Have to make a hood. Going to do the hem next, then hood, then buttons, then sleeves, then pockets last.

Robe and cotton shirt sketches and swatches below, the shirt will probably change.

[chapni]

Originally Posted by MoonStar

Haven't started the shirt yet but working on the pink fleece robe I started awhile back, sewed on the trim, sewed the front and back together. I haven't sewed heavy fabrics on my home machine before, I used the needle for thicker fabrics but it still sounded like I was sewing rocks, sounded like something was jamming. I tried varying the stitch length but it still sounded bumpy. It sewed it fine though so hopefully I won't kill my machine in the process.

The patch pockets will be sewn on by hand last. Still thinking about the buttons. Have to make a hood. Going to do the hem next, then hood, then buttons, then sleeves, then pockets last.

Robe and cotton shirt sketches and swatches below, the shirt will probably change.

the shirt sketch looks real cute! the pattern of the cloth and the contrasting blue cloth is real pretty
mashALLAH you've got great talent. Very handy too!

[MoonStar]

thanks! I'm still in the learning stages when it comes to patternmaking, practice makes perfect I figure. Right now I'm just sewing things I need, one day when I'm more comfortable with all aspects I'll move to on lenghas and more complicated things hopefully.

[MoonStar]

Sounds like an interesting book.

The Devil Sells Prada
By CAROLINE WEBER
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/bo...w/Weber-t.html

DELUXE: How Luxury Lost Its Luster.

By Dana Thomas.

Illustrated. 375 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

“Luxury,” Socrates once declared, “is artificial poverty.” I’m not poor, but there’s nothing like an afternoon spent shopping for luxury goods to make me feel that way. On a recent jaunt through some of Midtown Manhattan’s snazzier stores, I began to wonder why this should be the case. When, I asked myself, did it become commonplace to charge several thousand dollars for a mass-produced handbag? How could the flimsy designer sundress I bought on sale — a “steal,” the saleswoman assured me — still wind up costing a whole month’s salary? Why is my favorite brand of lipstick more expensive than a nice bottle of Italian wine? When did these products’ values grow so distorted, and what is the would-be customer to make of it all?

In the midst of my consumerist crisis, the question I should have been asking was: Dana Thomas, where have you been all my life? In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Thomas investigates the business of designer clothing, leather goods and cosmetics, and finds it wanting. Hijacked, over the past two or three decades, by corporate profiteers with a “single-minded focus on profitability,” the luxury industry has “sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers.” Hoodwinked? The truth hurts. After I read “Deluxe,” suddenly my new sundress no longer looked like such a steal. Au contraire, the book’s line of argument suggested, it was I who’d been robbed.

For Thomas, a cultural and fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris and the Paris correspondent for the Australian Harper’s Bazaar, the luxury industry is a sham because its offerings in no way merit the high price tags they command. Yet once upon a time, they most certainly did. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, when many of luxury’s founding fathers first set up shop, paying more money meant getting something truly exceptional. Dresses from Christian Dior, luggage from Louis Vuitton, jewelry from Cartier: in the golden period of luxury, these items carried prestige because of their superior craftsmanship and design. True, only the very privileged could afford them, but it was this exclusivity that gave them their cachet. Although they may have “cared about making a profit,” the merchants who served this pampered class aimed chiefly “to produce the finest products possible.”

All that changed, however, in the last decades of the 20th century, when a new breed of luxury purveyor, epitomized by Bernard Arnault, now the chairman and chief executive of the multibillion-dollar LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton conglomerate, first came on the scene. “A businessman, not a fashion person,” Arnault realized that the mystique of the great brand names represented an invaluable — and historically underexploited — asset. Identifying the luxury sector as “the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins,” Arnault snapped up Dior, Vuitton and a clutch of other star brands. Then, by spending hundreds of millions on advertising, dressing celebrities for the red carpet, “splashing the logo on everything from handbags to bikinis,” and pushing product in duty-free stores and flagship boutiques all around the world, he turned these brands into objects of global consumer desire. In so doing, Arnault changed “the course of luxury forever.”

And strictly, Thomas argues, for the worse. Insofar as luxury has gone corporate, relentlessly focused on the bottom line, quality has disappeared. In order to keep margins high (in 2005, LVMH recorded more than $17 billion in sales and a net profit of almost $1.8 billion), Arnault and his competitors have cut costs wherever and whenever possible. The most obvious strategies involve using cheaper materials, replacing skilled artisans with computers and machines and outsourcing labor to less expensive markets like China. Sneakier tactics include “cutting sleeves a half an inch shorter” (“when you get to 1,000, you see the savings,” one employee told the author), replacing finished seams with raw edges and eliminating linings on the grounds that “women don’t really need” them. A grouchy aside: my aforementioned sundress is (a) an LVMH brand and (b) unlined. It is also (c) white, which means that a lining would sure have come in handy. But if Arnault can amass a personal fortune of more than $21 billion by forcing me to display my underwear, then who am I to complain?

In truth, the perverse reality of luxury consumption today is that so few people are complaining, and so many are clamoring for what Thomas refers to (a bit too frequently for my taste) as a piece of the “dream.” Paradoxically, as craftsmanship has waned, consumer appetite has grown — and not just among luxury’s original, elite clientele. The vast reach of contemporary advertising, distribution and product-placement efforts has effectively democratized luxury, making once exclusive brands available, if only in the form of logo-covered sneakers or sunglasses, to middle-market customers the world over. “Luxury-brand logos convey wealth, status and chic,” Thomas explains, “even if the bearer of the logo-ed product is a middle-market suburban housewife who bought it on credit.”

As a result, a designer jacket or handbag or watch no longer transmits reliable information about its wearer’s socioeconomic stature or background. Without quite coming right out and saying it, Thomas seems nostalgic for the good old days when “a middle-market suburban housewife,” say, couldn’t be confused with her betters. The author is shocked to overhear a woman “in a designer pantsuit, good jewelry and Chanel sunglasses” expressing interest in a fake Rolex. Spotting a couple loading shopping bags into a $380,000 car, she is surprised to learn that their loot came from an outlet store. In a discussion of the booming, underground market for counterfeit luxury goods, she compares “folks with a craving for the goods but not enough dough for the genuine thing” to petty teenage drug users — eager “to buy a couple of joints with their allowance or baby-sitting money.” She quotes a commentator on the last days of the Roman Republic, who contrasts an era of rampant, nouveau-riche acquisitiveness to an earlier and more “patrician” age when “people used to know their place.”

These hints of condescension are regrettable, for Thomas’s message is relevant to shoppers of every stripe. Whether upscale or middle-market, paying in cash or buying on credit, today’s customer is barraged at every turn with the logos that, for titans like Arnault, mean pure, corporate gold. “Deluxe” performs a valuable service by reminding us that these labels don’t mean much else. Once guarantors of value and integrity, they are now markers that point toward nothing, guiding the consumer on a road to nowhere.

Caroline Weber is a frequent contributor to the Book Review. Her most recent book, “Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution,” will be published in paperback this fall.

[Purple_alien]

My sister wants to either do a double major in Pharmacy and Fashion, or minor in fashion. I think she should do the minor, since pharmacy is kinda hard. A friend of mine works for some designer in NYC, I don't think its vera wang, but its someone big. Anyway, I guess I will ask her, but really, do you need a degree in fashion to work in the industry?

[MoonStar]

Originally Posted by Purple_alien

My sister wants to either do a double major in Pharmacy and Fashion, or minor in fashion. I think she should do the minor, since pharmacy is kinda hard. A friend of mine works for some designer in NYC, I don't think its vera wang, but its someone big. Anyway, I guess I will ask her, but really, do you need a degree in fashion to work in the industry?

she'll have a mental and physical breakdown if she double majors in those two, fashion design is a lot of work and so is pharmacy. You don't need a degree if you're really good but it helps in learning basic skills, but doing an associate degree/minor in fashion design or patternmaking would be better, since you're taking all the main courses without liberals, and it'll help you get internships.

[Sha_]

Originally Posted by MoonStar

I used the needle for thicker fabrics but it still sounded like I was sewing rocks, sounded like something was jamming.

There's needles for thicker fabrics ? I was shortening a pair of jeans and snapped about 3 machine needles (so i just decided to miss the lumpy bits/[seams of front and back leg peice] out)

That design for the shirt is really nice mashAllah Moonstar.

[kamuzrana]

Originally Posted by imported_sha_

There's needles for thicker fabrics ? I was shortening a pair of jeans and snapped about 3 machine needles (so i just decided to miss the lumpy bits/[seams of front and back leg peice] out)

hahahaha yeah. i've done that. ma was pretty miffed.

i made myself an abaya the other day. my first thing with sleeves. i'm not too good with sleeves. any secrets u guys have? i gather and everything but i still get puckers.

and i made my neck opening too small. but i loves it anyway!

[Sha_]

Originally Posted by MoonStar

thanks! I'm still in the learning stages when it comes to patternmaking, practice makes perfect I figure. Right now I'm just sewing things I need, one day when I'm more comfortable with all aspects I'll move to on lenghas and more complicated things hopefully.

I want to be able to patternmake. Existing patterns i tend to find are a little old fashioned, or aimed at older people (unless maybe i havent looked hard enough...). but at the moment i kind of suck at making things from scratch. or adjusting existing patterns for that matter. it doesnt come out quite the right fit. But inshAllah i'm enrolling in a part time course on wednesday for fashion and design / (on top of going to uni, looking for a job/ starting an isoc[/msa] ). But i really need to work on my technical skills. like you said Moonstar, it takes practice..but it also takes so much time !! l

[Sha_]

This is the sari bangle bag i made for my AS Level technology project (yr12). yeah i was feeling lazy and wanted to make something easy peasy and i thought it was gona be just 2 peices of fabric but it wasnt quite as simple as that, but fairly straightforward nonetheless.

I used a purple see through organza sari (to which i added beads), under it i layered (the end of) a navy polyester sari with yellowgold embroidery. the lining was the the main body of the sari which was plain navy.
In hindsight i think i should have used the purple sari on the top of the lining (or maybe just something else soft and plain lilac(?) so it would be more inconspicuous and professional looking.
I flipped the top edges through the bangles and hand stitched them down to create the handles, being careful i didnt stitch through the purple layer, so it wouldnt show on the front.
Once again though, i realised afterwards, it would have been good idea to have sewn in the bangles within the front layers and the lining, to give a more professional finish.
I also wanted more Indian-y bangles but there arent any desi shops near where i live so i couldnt find any in time.

But i'm really pleased with how it came out though (alhamdulillah), because it was a kind of rushed project. (and my teachers totally sucked )