Nicola Morgan; Felicity Brown; Nicola Morgan
The New Fashion: Interventions in Materials and Techniques is the latest exhibition to feature at London College of Fashion. It is showcasing 8 emerging fashion designers and is the first of three different exhibitions in fashion design, illustration and photography, taking place at the Fashion Space Gallery from February 16 to April 21 2012.
Unlike the traditional exhibition layout where each designer has their own space – New Fashion is instead split up into different sections: emotion, tradition, form and forward thinking. The fact that all of the designers are combined gives the audience the opportunity to look at the actual garments instead of focusing on which designer each item is by.
Derek Lawlor; Zyanya Keizer; Fyodor Golan
The emotion section was showing Una Burke, the fashion artefact graduate who has already achieved critical acclaim in pieces from Italian Vogue and The Guardian. The work that is exhibited shows the designers craftsmanship where pieces of leather and brass are formed to show various human gestures.
Tradition saw the work from Felicity Brown, Eleanor Amoroso and Chi Chi Luo – all of which have used the history of fashion to find fresh and new ideas. Felicity Brown has worked for many well-known companies such as Mulberry and Lavin, and uses techniques such as fabric manipulation and block printing when creating the pieces. Eleanor Amoroso has a signature of using a technique called macramé – a technique that uses a variety of knots to create a variety of sculptural silhouettes. Chi Chi Luo has been names One to Watch by Vogue.com and Italian Vogue, and uses knotting and fringing to build structure within the pieces.
Una Burke
The section titles Form was all about the relationship of cloth to the body. Fyodor Golan manipulated material along the contours of the female form and used techniques such as embossing leather. Nicola Morgan created ‘semi-kinetic’ pieces using 3D printing technology to create soft tailored silhouettes. Zyanya Keizer stretched materials and emphasised the anatomy by using appliqué techniques. Finally Derek Lawlor contributed to this section and created pieces by adding and subtracting stitches, as well as adapting the knit structures to the movement of the body.
Chi Chi Luo; Elanor Amoroso; Felicity Brown; Fyodor Golan; Felicity Brown
Finally in the Forward Thinking section, there shows how technology is used to develop different concepts and techniques within fashion. Once again we saw work from Nicola Morgan who has used the 3D printing technique that started out for making object prototypes. Also Felicity Brown contributed to the Forward Thinking section by addressing sustainability issues in her work, for example by hand dying work in small batches, which reduces the environmental impact.
New Fashion: Interventions in Materials and Techniques is taking place at the Fashion Space Gallery 16th February to 21th April, for more information visit Fashion Space Gallery.
Image credits: photography Kara Stanton
