Outpost for Sportsgirl

I'm really excited to write this post because I've been looking forward to this range coming out for almost a whole year! My awesome friend Jess from was selected to show her 4th year collection at the Sportsgirl Graduate Showcase at Loreal Melbourne Fashion Festival last year. That was exciting enough in itself, but what we didn't know then was that the sponsors were looking for two designers  to produce a capsule range for Sportsgirl's inaugural 'Graduate Collection'. This meant that Jess had to re-work the ideas from her range (there's a photo of the original range in my post about our fashion show) into five garments that would appeal to the Sportsgirl customer, working with Sportsgirl and attending fittings all year. The range is out now and I was so excited and proud that I ran out as soon as I heard and bought a jumper, skirt and shirt.

Me and my grumpy face showing off the chunky knit jumper, the "Jess" voile shirt and the knit skirt.

The range is in select Sportsgirl stores now and online at Sportsgirl.com.au

Summer School Exhibition

For the past two weeks, I've been teaching fashion & textile design to some very cool kids at summer school. Last night they had their graduation and exhibition to show off their work.

 The summer school was held at UTS for year 11 students from priority funded schools. I was amazed at the creativity and talent these kids showed across three areas of design - fashion, visual communication and industrial design. They spent two days learning about each of these disciplines before choosing one to concentrate on for a second project. 

The first project for fashion design was screen printing. The students designed paper stencils and printed on t-shirts and bags. It's a tricky technique to perfect but they picked it up very quickly.

Two awesome examples of making your mistakes work for you. When the girl doing the Patrick t-shirt forgot to put the whites of his eyes in, she painted on some sunglasses. When the text on the Mickey Mouse t-shirt bled, the designer grabbed a paintbrush and roughed it up to make it look more purposeful. I thought her t-shirt had a very 'street art' feel to it, with the black stencil and fluoro orange 'LOVE'.

The second project concentrated on transforming recycled junk into sculptural fashion pieces (it was all very Project Runway!). This dress was a tribute to obsolete technology, using cut up CDs, video tape and a necklace made from broken headphones.

 

Wrapping paper, laser-cutting offcuts, vinyl, and pink safety pins.

Top made from woven strips of garden tarpaulin and an inflatable cactus party decoration. Skirt made from paper, fake flowers and green cable ties.

The industrial design workshops revolved around making lamps, displayed here in front of visual communication's posters.

For their second project, industrial design worked as a group to turn the sample prints and sketches from all of the first three workshops into a beautiful mobile.

Transformation

Thought I'd share with you a video I made for the U@UTS Summer School that I'm teaching at. We had an orientation for it the other day and I made this video as an intro to the fashion workshops.
The first few clips are from the 2010 UTS Grad show, and the others are all related to the 'transformation' theme of the summer school. Enjoy!


Untitled from Ali Kenworthy on Vimeo.

Some of the clips used are:

ISSEY MIYAKE - Animation by Euphrates
Hussein Chalayan - Transformer Dress
Hussein Chalayan - Autum/Winter 2000
Animorfos
Viktor & Rolf

No longer a fashion student

Yesterday I received a Bachelor of Design in Fashion and Textiles with First Class Honours. It was fun! The Great Hall at our university is being renovated at the moment, meaning that this year's graduation ceremonies were held at Darling Harbour. I think it was much better than having it at uni as it held more people, was a great backdrop for photos and best of all, there was plenty of gelato nearby!

Pics from the fashion show

We finally got the internet connected at our place! Here are the show photos, finally. The runway photos (ie, the good ones) were taken by my brother.






My friend Jess O'Connor's amazing knitwear collection

I won a couple of prizes!

Finished!

I hate to be such a tease with these pictures, but I'm still deciding whether to do the big reveal of the collection after my assessment (tomorrow) or after the fashion show (December 8th). I'll probably do it tomorrow. This is a photoshoot I did on Thursday with Natasha from eMg Models.
So everything is finally finished. I present it all to my teachers tomorrow, then it's off to the pub!
I am really really really excited to be done!

First garment finished!

Yay! I've been so busy working on the collection I haven't really had time to write about it. My mum is helping me and things are coming along really well but it's still kind of overwhelming to think about the amount of work we have to do! I was determined to get this coat finished first because we need to hand in a photo of our work on Friday to be used on the grad show website and little personal profiles we get to hand out at the show. Most fashion students end up using an illustration or a picture of their textiles, because it's unlikely anyone has a whole look finished at this stage. My frustration in previous years has been looking through the profiles to find a particular collection and not being able to connect any of the images with what was shown on the runway. So I was really happy to have this coat finished and ready to photograph on my friend! I will probably use the picture below for the grad show stuff (it has to be a square image).


Note Jenni is wearing my awesome Pucci gumboots! I love them so much.
We're still sewing and printing away, and I'm also working on my business plan so that I can hopefully win a bit of money to start up Bell Street! Next week I'm going to Queensland for a couple of days to visit my cousin and her baby and see the Valentino exhibition, so I should have lots to talk about!

This is the online invite for our grad show. Isn't it cool? The fashion show will be streamed online, so definitely save that date!

Crits and Holidays

As I've mentioned before, this blog was made for a uni assignment this semester. That assignment has now been 'handed in' (how do you really hand in a blog anyway? Hi Donna!), and so you may have noticed that I've kind of slacked off with the updates. I've been VERY busy with working on the collection lately. I feel like I've said/written that sentence a thousand times over the last month or so but trust me, I'm just as sick of saying it as other people are of hearing it!
Tomorrow is quite an exciting day as I have my assessment at 9am, then I'll rush home and run around my apartment madly trying to pack my bag as I'm flying out to Paris in the afternoon! I make it sound like a spontaneous decision but my mum and I have been planning this holiday for over a year so I'm very excited that it's finally happening! We'll head to London after Paris and then back home for another semester of madness. I do plan on keeping the blog going next semester so stay tuned!
For now I'll leave you with some of the endless mood boards we're always making, and the range drawings for the final twelve looks (Should be able to click to enlarge).

Abstract


Sixties London

Streets of London

Sixties lifestyle
Sixties fashion
Colour palette
Textile print development
Range Drawings
See you in a few weeks!

Fourth Year blogs

I know some of you are interested in my course and the design process, so I thought I'd share some links to blogs by other students in my year. We're all blogging this semester because, in case you hadn't worked it out by now, this is all for an assessment task.


Melisa is a lovely, sunny person whose collection is all about death and memento mori

Jo's work is inspired by "ancient khmer temples, 19th century bohemian artists, film, music art and everything in between."

Chloe is my delightfully strange friend (I know she'll take that as a compliment) who, like me, is always stuck in the past. Her era of choice was a time of great but troubled writers, dusty books, corsets and feathered quills. The other day, a teacher was looking at her textiles samples and said 'This looks like a dead bird... fantastic!'

I can't remember Bronwyn's concept but she is doing menswear and her blog is really interesting.

Jess was the first person I met in my course and our mutual love of chocolate and lollies bonded us for good (Stay tuned for our Lolly Emporium, opening whenever we get sick of being fashion designers). Her collection is all about outlaws and is full of amazing knitwear.

Anthony is the only guy in our year group of 47. His collection is inspired by the seven days of creation, and if his moodboard is anything to go by, it should be pretty amazing.

Amelia is another textiles-based designer - although she actually did the textiles elective, so she's a real textiles person (I feel like I'm just faking it sometimes). Her blog has some amazing sculptural inspiration images. She's also awesome.

Kathryn's blog is full of inspiring photos and, unlike mine, has actual writing on most posts. Her collection is about an adventurous woman travelling to Marrakesh (I think).

Kate's collection is inspired by phantasmagoria, and is going to have the most amazingly weird and wonderful prints. She's invented a family of strange little characters and is currently making up stories about them.

Ginger (yes it's her real name, no she doesn't have red hair, shut up now) is the menswear queen. Lover of 'good beards', English accents and skinny rockstars, her blog is pretty damn good eye candy. She's the only girl who can look amazing wearing her dad's old clothes. She and Jess are off to conquer London next year and I will miiiiissssss themmmmm.

There are lots of other good student blogs (which you can probably find by looking through everyone's links lists) but I'll leave it at these ten for now.