Mystic Girls and Butterflies - CNIII

Abstract

Fashion designers, especially wearable art designers, often explore fine art drawings as sources of inspiration. Collaborations between wearable art designers and fine artists occurred not only in contemporary fashion world, but can be traced back to the 19 th century, and bloomed in the early 20 th (Mackrell, 2005). Many famous designers in the 20 th century collaborated with artists to create representative works establishing their position in the field of fashion. One of the most famous and successful collections derived from fine art, Mondrian Look, was designed by Yves Saint Laurent in [1965][1966]. For Mystic Girls and Butterflies, a piece of wearable art, the designer was inspired by an experimental drawing titled CN-III, created by the collaborating artist. For CN-III, the artist used figurative representation and formal abstraction to create multilayered meditations upon time, space and a particular sphere of existence. The goal of this experimental drawing was to print multiple digital drawings on separate sheets of clear plastic. All the printed plastic images were stacked together to create one, two and a half-dimensional image. In CN-III, thousands of lines and shapes to translate complex spatial relationships between people, places and things familiar to the artist. Thus, the purposes of creating this piece of wearable art were to: (a) experiment utilizing fabrics to emulate spatial relationships and (b) explore digital textile printing, 3D printing technologies, and handcraft techniques to transform a two and a half-dimensional drawing to three-dimensional garment.Digital textile printing technology has been widely used in fashion education and industry for over 30 years. Its advantages include fast production, high resolution, low waste levels of water, and maximizes high energy efficiency (Memon, 2012). The designer used digital textile printing technology as the main design concepts to transfer the CN-III drawing onto the fabrics. The initial drawing was finished in Adobe Photoshop with multiple layers, which place the objects file at. Each layer contained a line drawn object illustrating the concept of perspective. The designer combined several layers and divided the layers into six groups according to the objects categories, and the perspectives of the space. Garment flat patterns were created in Lectra Modaris Classic 2D V7R2, then fitted to a body form, and modified by draping for examining the accuracy of the flat pattern. The final paper patterns were digitized into Modaris system and converted into DXF files to be opened in Adobe Illustrator to engineer the print. In order to represent the space via a garment, there were three layers of two kinds of fabric used, cotton sateen and 8mm silk organza. Cotton sateen is the base layer not only because of its stiffness and the characteristic of high chromaticity with digital printing, but also represents the bottom layer of the inspiration art work due to its dull surface. The purpose of using two layers of the silk organza was to establish the...