Week 5 - Folk

This week we were given a brief to design a shirt based on a folk theme. We were given an induction based on the meaning of the word folk to give us some sort of starting point. Folk is the term for people. We looked at folk costumes across different parts of eastern europe and how they differ. From researhing into folk costumes I found that there was alot of work that went into each garment including braiding, handwork, layering, pin tucking and lots of detail. Lots of vibrant colours such as reds and greens were used with heavy patterns and embroidery. From this research we were asked to explore this to form your inspiration and design research and development culminating in a finished shirt design. To begin with I struggled a little with this topic because I didnt actually like the costumes we had looked at so instead I used them as starting point and tried to find recent images that to me had a folk feel. Folk had been a recent trend so I looked out for designers in magazines and came across designers such as Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana that had used lots of prints, embroidery and tassles which had a real sort of bohemian feel to it.

As soon as i started looking at more recent folk trends I became more interested and I wanted to make my design more fashionable so you could wear it today and look trendy. So I collected pictures from magazines and I new I wanted to design a checked shirt as there was alot of check and tartan in the shops and on the catwalk. I found a perfect fabric sticking with the tradional green folky kind of colours and I then came up with lots of different shirt designs, I settled on an off the shoulder shirt with lots of ruffles to give it a real folk feel and I didnt want to just design an average boring shirt! I was really happy with my final design as I think it reflected the topic well and because I had researched into recent trends it would fit in perfect with the trends right now!

Here are the pictures of my final design with a fully styled outfit with fabric swatches and flat drwaings together with my mood board!