thesis collection: how i began my design process

graduation day at bunka

the beginning of a design process is always tricky, and it gets even trickier when this particular collection is going to define one’s entire fashion education. i graduated in 2007 from the bunka fashion college in tokyo, japan, and transferred here to parsons in new york, where i will finally be done with my studies in may 2010.

although there were tons of seriously unnecessary classes in between that i still have to take (university liberal arts, for example, take away a year of my life at each class), graduating would mark my 5th year in plunging head-first into fashion.

looking back, it all seems really cloudy and i feel like i’ve been in a daze… or rather, a whirlwind roller-coaster ride. when i started at bunka, i knew nothing about sewing or drawing. i couldn’t sketch a human figure to save my life, let alone do fashion illustrations, where the body is usually elongated to imitate and exaggerate tall and skinny models with pin heads. plus, i was in a school where everything was taught in japanese, and although i had completed a year in studying the language, no language school was going to teach me all the technical terms that i needed to know.

the importance of good clothing contruction

i picked up everything i now know about patterning and sewing in bunka. my teachers believed that no design was good design unless it was properly constructed, and unless it was beautifully from the inside out.

this importance of construction stayed with me through the years, and perhaps it was because of this influence from bunka that i have grown to love, respect and admire rei kawakubo, junya watanabe and jun takahashi so much. if you have ever had the opportunity to wear a piece of clothing from comme des garcons or undercover, two of my favourite brands, then you will know that those aren’t just clothing; they are a piece of art. somewhere in japan, some master designer and pattern maker have constructed this amazing 3d concoction that is so intricate and complicated, and yet hugs one’s body when worn.

if there was one thing i learnt at parsons, it was how to draw. while we had weekly drawing classes at bunka, there wasn’t so much emphasis placed on it and i got by with some really basic sketching and illustration abilities. at parsons though, we had 6 hours of drawing classes a week with live models, and i really credit my first drawing teacher, mr chu, for showing me how to paint and draw the human body.

i remember all those years of me being frustrated about not being able to put my ideas onto paper. i had so many images in my head, of things i wanted to make, but i had no idea how to draw them. it was a handicap, and i felt it. with hundreds of hours of practice, i finally got the hang of it and with the ability to now illustrate my ideas, my designs have also improved along the way.

i’m tired of being a student; i must have said this a million times before. i’m a lot older than my classmates, and i’ve had experience working in the real world, which is a challenge i really enjoy. having said that, when i realised i was now a senior at school and had one last chance to really show what i’ve learnt, it was weeks of mindboggling thinking and reflection.

our summer assignment (yes, fashion students have actual summer homework while other students have their breaks) was to come up with at least 50 croquis each for 3 different collections. croquis, meaning fully coloured sketches of design ideas.

but where was i to start? i was lost. in all my previous design collections, i had always immediately come up with an idea to play with – the japanese samurai, organic architecture, decay and decomposition, and so on. i have a little notebook that i keep with me to jot down random ideas in my head that come from anywhere. i could be watching a film, reading a book, visiting a museum, going to a small town, on a bus, at an exhibition… inspirations and ideas are all around us.

but this was my senior thesis, a huge step in my life, and nothing could make me just watch some random film and base my collection on that. it needed to be something i felt; something that actually meant something.

remembering my life

so my left brain took over for a while, and i made me a mindmap. you know, of my life.

i really thought hard, to remember everything that has happened till now. i’ve 26 years of living behind me, you know? a lot has happened in 26 years. i just tried to remember all the milestones, things that really affected me, experiences that changed my life, made me smile, made me cry, made me jump up and scream “hurray!”.

i thought about different chapters that i was at during my life, and what sort of events happened in those stages that changed something in me, and about me. it was a long process that really took me a few days to really think about and reflect. it was probably the first time ever that i have really sat down and thought about my life as a whole and how everything has affected me and made me who i am today.

after writing everything down, and after going back and looking at my life – all scribbled in some mindmap, the ideas came to me. it was then that i knew what i wanted to do.

i really concentrated more on my childhood because i think it has shaped who i am today. i think 80% of who we are, is a result of our genetics, and also of our environment and how we were nurtured, especially in the earlier stages of our lives. the rest of who we are, is probably the result of subsequent experiences we’ve had.

daydreaming and imagination add some whimsy to my designs

my childhood wasn’t too shabby. i remember following my sister around everywhere, i remember playing both barbie and legos with my brother. i remember us building the hugest lego castle, and i remember giving him a mean punch when he thought it was funny to knock it all down. i remember we had a bay window in our bedroom, and we draped all sorts of blankets over the windows, tied them randomly, draped them over the backs of chairs, pulled all our sheets and pillows to the carpet and made ourselves our very own indoor tent. i remember we had some hilarious secret password to enter, that would change every 5 minutes. i remember spending hours playing and reading there.

i took piano lessons from the age of 3, and one day when i was about 4, coming back from piano class, my mom and i stopped by a bookstore and i picked up a hard-covered book that had a cute rabbit on its cover. it was the adventures of brer rabbit by enid blyton. that was my first ever enid blyton book. i don’t know what was it that made me love it so much, but i did. from that day on, i would skip over to the bookstore with 5 or 6 dollars in my hand to buy a new enid blyton book each day.

perhaps it was the way she described each scene so vividly or how she talked about fairies and gnomes, children and fairy folk going on adventures, golliwogs and naughty dolls, baked buns with cream and treacle pudding. i had no idea what treacle pudding was, by the way, but from the way enid blyton described it in her stories, i knew it had to be amazing.

my favourites books and series were about amelia jane, the famous five, shadow the sheepdog (whom my dog, shadow is named after), mr galliano’s circus, mallory towers, the naughtiest girl at school, the wishing chair, and of course, the faraway tree series.

the faraway tree is the biggest and grandest tree in the enchanted wood, that towers over all the other trees below it. all sorts of people live in the tree; there is the angry pixie who will throw something at you if you peep into his tree-window, dame wash-a-lot who pours the dirty washing from her laundry down the tree, mister watzisname who doesn’t remember his own name so people call him watzisname, the saucepan man who strings saucepans and pots all over him, moonface who has a face round like the moon, and silky the fairy with golden silky hair. the magic faraway tree has branches that spread so far and wide, it goes into a cloud at the top of the tree, where a magical land swings by each week. one day it could be the land of birthdays, or the land of giants, and the next week, it could be the land of topsy-turvy, or the land of do-as-you-please and the land of take-what-you-want. (you might have heard of these lands being mentioned in the movie v for vendetta, where v even read the faraway tree to evey).

these books were perhaps the building blocks to my creative process even today. because anything was possible in enid blyton’s books. they brought me into imaginary worlds when i was younger, and i don’t think i ever left them.

Tagged as: design, parsons, senior thesis