Elements of Fashion and Apparel Designing

273 Pages·2008·12.73 MB·English

by  Puneet Bansal

Elements of Fashion and
Apparel Designing
Puneet Bansal
Book Enclave
Jaipur India
First Published: 2008
ISBN: 978-81-8152-201-6
©Author
Published by
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Printed at
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Contents
l. Introduction 1
2. Elements of Fashion and Apparel 21
3. Exotic Impulses in Fashion and Apparel 35
4. Fashion Design and Product Development 63
5. Female to Feminine 86
6. Fashion Entrepreneurship 115
7. Fashion Photography 141
8. Lingerie to Swimw ear 164
9. Using Perfume and Techniques of Make-Up 195
10. Fashion Merchandising 219
11. Fashion and its Formation 249

1
Introduction
The Face of Fashion
The Apparel and Textile Design major provides students with
professional preparation in designing apparel and textile soft
goods. Students create and evaluate designs considering
interactions among the person, the product, and the environments
in which they are used. Students are taught to assess the needs,
values, goals, and resources as they propose design solutions.
Products are designed to promote comfort, performance, and
aesthetic satisfaction. The ultimate aim is to improve-the quality
of life and the quality of the environment.
Apparel designers in the twenty-first century will form new
alliances with professionals in interdisciplinary teams. These
teams may include apparel designers and biomechanical
engineers, textile chemists and physicists, or medical scientists.
Emphasis is placed on effective decision-making and
communication with professionals in other disciplines, employers,
employees, and clients. Computer-aided design technology is
used to create innovative design solutions to functional and
aesthetic design problems.
Western culture is developing a grand love affair with the
distinctive fashion style that is India: Along with Indian music
and spirituality, Indian Clothing is having a huge impact on the
mainstream identities of western style and culture. Cognates
provide students with additional depth in a focused area of study;
these include entrepreneurship, design communications, historic
2 Elements of Fashion and Apparel Designing
and cultural studies, material science, and applied art. Indian
people express themselves a great deal through their clothing.
Their spiritual quest for perfection plays a role in their choices
of beautifully coloured, dramatic, and flowing garments. The
styles speak to the spirit with sumptuous, vibrant colours woven
into the intricate and ornate designs to be found resonating
throughout India.
Started as an alternative dress form in Kashmir and Punjab,
it has grown in popularity all over India and in all the muslim
countries of the world, especially with younger women. With
Celebrities like Goldie hawn, Sally field, Hillary Clinton, Jeniffer
Lopez and the Late Princess Diana adorning the Sal war (Shalwar)
kameez at high profile events, this garment is the clearly the
current flavour in the West.
Salwars are pajama-like trousers gathered at the waist and
ankles, worn underneath a long, loose tunic known as a kameez.
Sal war or shalwar can be worn in many styles. Styles keep
changing with Trends. Recently big bottoms were in fashion and
now short Kurtas are back in vogue.
From a simple masquerade to the mask, from a 'role'
(personnage) to a 'person' (personne), to a name, to an individual;
from the latter to a being possessing metaphysical and moral
value; from a moral consciousness to a scared being; from the latter
to a fundamental form of thought and action-the course is
complete.
Fashion is often thought of as a kind of mask disguising the
'true' nature of the body or person. It is seen as a superficial gloss.
Yet, if we follow Mauss and Bourdieu, we can regard the ways in
which we clothe the body as an active process or technical means
for constructing and presenting a bodily self. Western fashion (elite
or high fashion) is a particular variant of this in which the designer
plays the role of definer.
Cendars's theme, that women wear their bodies through their
clothes, is central to The Face of Fashion. Delaunay's approach to
clothes was revolutionary. She combined her interest in the 1920s
art movements of cubism, futurism and fauvism with a belief th~
women's clothes should suit their new lifestyles. Accordingly,
Delaunay favoured simple practical lines of clothing which
followed the shape of the female body (rather than dictating it).
Introduction 3
But she then took the surface of the fabric and the way in
which it draped the body as a canvas on which she designed
unique body paintings. In anticipation of Roland Barthes, she
transformed the female body into maps of vectors, forces and
dynamic movements.
Her clothes were characterised by bold geometric patterns
and colours that followed the bodily vectors, reminiscent of her
canvases. This approach to clothing influenced subsequent trends
in the fashion industry, although Delaunay's outspoken views
about women's autonomy in their clothing were somewhat lost.
Her designs do suggest new ways to look at the phenomenon of
fashion.
The starting-point of this book is the dissolution and
reconstitution of the term fashion. While acknowledging that not
all clothing is fashion, all clothing systems have at least a distant
relationship with fashion systems and stylistic conventions. For
example, military, religious and legal clothing can be related to
earlier dress codes where associations of tradition, authority,
order, distinctiveness and hierarchy-even intimidation-are
deliberately invoked. Moreover, such clothes do change over time
albeit slowly-with considerable thought going into the design of
new regalia. The excessive western-style military uniforms
adopted by many contemporary military regimes underline the
fact that even these garments are directly influenced by fashion.
A recent example has been the ordination of women,
necessitating the creation of special clerical robes. In Australia,
these red, flowing, yoked surplices featured a broad frontal panel
decorated with a design chosen by each woman-a concession to
women's interest in fashion, perhaps. While women have adopted
this variation on traditional garb for church services, they are
wearing other outfits (more like a corporate wardrobe) for their
non-pulpit duties. Their designs combined style with practicality.
Adele Palmer described her mix-and-match array of pants,
shirt, jacket and coat dress, in finely pinstriped black wool, as 'a
fairly demure outlook with a certain reverent attitude'. Jill
Fitzsimon proposed a longline jacket and 'modest but fashionable'
length skirt in mid-grey wool teamed with a white 'draped
neckline blouse' featuring 'a delicate random blue cross print-a
chic alternative to the dog collar'.
4 Elements of Fashion and Apparel Designing
Linda Jackson's choice was 'an intense blue' wool or linen
suit, consisting of a straight skirt and long-line single-breasted
jacket buttoned to the neck. A matching white blouse featured a
dog-collar neckline. She also designed a cyclamen pink smock for
more formal occasions.
The designs attempted to balance the austerity of religious
garb with the conventions of career dress, yet also incorporate
elements of high fashion. Thus, all the designs featured a collar
(variations on the dog collar) or incorporated a high neckline,
'modest' skirt or jacket length, and the insignia (a cross) of office
(as jewellery or patterned the fabric).
Each designer stressed the need to create identifiable and
distinctive outfits which displayed a symbol of religious ministry.
This example illustrates how the clothing of women clergy
constitutes a technical means of fulfilling an occupational role by
clothing the body to produce particular practical, social and
gestural effects. The bricolage of fashion systems combined in
these designs suggests that fashion systems interact and compete
in the production of appropriate garb.
The viewpoint adopted here rejects the assumption that
fashion is unique to the culture of capitalism. That argument draws
on the work of Simmel and Veblen who explicitly linked the
development of fashion to the emergence of discourses of
individualism, class, civilisation and consumerism. Moreover, this
concept of fashion is specifically European or western, and is
differentiated from the clothing behaviour of other cultures.
Simmel's views have grounded subsequent work. He argued that:
This motive of foreignness, which fashion employs in its
socialising endeavours, is restricted to higher civilisation, because
novelty, which foreign origin guarantees in extreme form is often
regarded by primitive races as an evil. This is certainly one of the
reasons why primitive conditions of life favour a correspondingly
infrequent change of fashions.
The savage is afraid of strange appearances; the difficulties
and dangers that beset his career cause him to scent danger in
anything new which he does not understand and which he cannot
consign to a familiar category. Civilisation, however, transforms
this affection into its very opposite. Whatever is exceptional,
Introduction 5
bizarre, or conspicuous, or whatever departs from the customary
norm, exercises a peculiar charm upon the man of culture, entirely
independent of its material justification. The removal of the feeling
of insecurity with reference to all things new was accomplished
by the progress of civilisation.
Treating fashion as a marker of civilisation, with all its
attendant attributes, is the reason why fashion has been excluded
from the repertoires of non-western cultures. Other codes of
clothing behaviour are relegated to the realm of costume which,
as 'pre-civilised' behaviour, is characterised in opposition to
fashion, as traditional, unchanging, fixed by social status, and
group-oriented.
This theoretical framework, with its rigid distinction between
traditional and modern, has produced a remarkably inflexible and
unchanging analysis of fashion. Moreover, it fails to account for
the circulation of changing clothing codes and stylistic registers
in non-European societies. The relation of bodies to clothes is far
deeper than the equation of fashion with the superficial products
of'c onsumer culture' allows. Clothing is neither simply functional
nor symbolic in the conventional senses.
Clothing does a good deal more than simply clad the body
for warmth, modesty or comfort. Codes of dress are technical
devices which articulate the relationship between a particular body
and its lived milieu, the space occupied by bodies and constituted
by bodily actions. In other words, clothes construct a personal
habitus.
'Habitus' refers to specialised techniques and ingrained
knowledges which enable people to negotiate the different
departments of existence. Habitus includes 'the unconscious
dispositions, the classification schemes, taken-for-granted
preferences which are evident in the individual's sense of the
appropriateness and validity of his [sic] taste for cultural goods
and practices' as well as being 'inscribed on to the body' through
body techniques and modes of self presentation.
The body, as a physical form, is trained to manifest particular
postures, movements and gestures. The body is a natural form
that is culturally primed to fit its occupancy of a chosen social
group. Body trainings create certain possibilities (such as special