Jiacheng Wang
I am a fashion designer with a focus on silhouette studies. My main interest in fashion design is to try to incorporate silhouettes and details of traditional clothing from different regions into my designs. I try to understand the culture of a region’s clothing, which is a very interesting process. During the year I focused on combining Rococo-style furniture, architecture, and clothing, I take the silhouette from architectural and furniture shapes, using rough and simple producing skills and materials to show my ideas. Eliminating elaborate and extravagant decoration and using the most direct approach to create the silhouette I wanted.
From this project, I wanted to express the idea of replacing refinement with roughness, attacking the extreme luxury of the Rococo period.
Works
Jiacheng Wang FAC
This project was inspired by the decoration and furniture of Rococo architecture. During my research phase, I took many pictures of the architecture in Glasgow as my first-hand research and then I extracted some elements from these pictures and drew some patterns. In the costume analysis phase, I did a lot of historical research and drew inspiration from them for sleeves, collars, and trims. I was fascinated by the puff sleeves and ham sleeves of the period. During my research, I found a book on the pattern-making of the period, which gave me the opportunity to try and do some pattern-making research. This helped me to develop the silhouette of my trench coat.
In the next phase, I worked on the silhouette of the building by draping on the mannequin and imitating the decoration on the skirts of the Rococo period. In the next stage of my development, I researched the process of furniture making and discovered the rawer aesthetics and the rougher textures within the luxurious exterior of furniture. I applied this to my sewing and decorating of clothes.
By making a collage of my drawings of buildings and cut-outs and adding the structure of the furniture to the collage. The result was my silhouette collage. I then made a number of sketches based on these collages and used them to analyze my collages in terms of structure, detail, and stitching. This was a very interesting process.
Next was my research into furniture construction, where I took simple and straightforward silhouettes from old furniture and applied them to clothing, which I felt was a way of breaking up or supporting the silhouette. I initially intended to use wood as my raw material to achieve this effect, but the quality of the wood itself made me abandon it and I used foam panels instead.
After completing this research, I chose six of my favorite silhouettes from my sketches and started to make my prototypes. I had a lot of problems making the skirt for the first pattern, so I made a number of versions to achieve the final result I wanted. At first, I used cotton as the internal support for my skirt, but I was not very happy with the result it gave me. So I replaced the cotton and fishbone with foam panels as support for the shape of my skirt, and then changed the shape of the skirt at the beginning. This made me very happy with it.
The second garment was more about conveying my idea of roughness, so I didn’t hem the fabric and left a lot of the stitching exposed, and then let the fabric draw out naturally, a raggedness that suited my idea of a delicate look with some roughness.
I learned a lot from working on the third pattern, I changed the way I threaded the sewing machine to make my sewing look better, which is one of my favorite parts, and I applied the previous pattern to this trench coat. For the collar of the trench coat, I used a horse hair canvas.
For the fabric, I looked at a lot of curtain and sofa fabrics, which are not as detailed as the garment fabrics, but they fit my theme better. I then added a few garment fabrics to make the whole outfit look less rough and old-fashioned. To make my clothes more in tune with today’s fashion trends.