Arts Thread

Final Year University portfolio. It was important to me to relate my final collection back to myself. I began to reminisce over old memories, looking back at photographs. Upon looking at these images, I realised that they evoked many memories that I had forgotten, especially relating to my childhood. After thinking about my own memory of childhood times, I was unclear whether memories I had were my own recollection or ones that had been implanted or altered in my mind, by photographs and stories relayed by older friends and relatives. The project explores the idea of forgotten nostalgia. Memories distort and become inaccurate records of the actual events over time. Looking at images of myself as a child, often wearing items of my parent’s clothing, lead to further research on children wearing clothes incorrectly. The childhood images often depicted the wearing of oversized and mismatched garments. I combined casualwear with tailoring aspects, involving sweatshirts, jackets, altered and layered garments, emphasising distortion in fashion. To capture the idea of ‘a forgotten nostalgia’, I have experimented with merging different concepts and techniques. My research highlighted mismatched concepts, which I have captured by mixing different fashion genres, including tailoring and casualwear. The final line-up features fashion items, such as sweatshirts and workman's jackets, which have been layered and edited, to achieve a collection based on distorted memories and incorrectly worn clothing. I have adapted original pattern blocks to highlight this distortion further, for example using basic sweatshirt blocks to create skirts and scarves, as 'incorrectly worn items’. I have also experimented with blocks of colour within my collection, to capture the childhood aspects of my concept, including colours traditionally considered to clash, such as red and pink. To further highlight the mismatched ideas within my collection, I have included a mix of fabric textures, such as wool jacket material, thick and thin sweatshirt jersey, neoprene, and rib.