First Wardrobe Concepts
Having no experience in fashion design, a field of endeavor that I had never dreamed of pursuing, my first attempts at this were necessarily clumsy and difficult. What I wanted was something very out of the ordinary - something detached from common, contemporary fashion. I also needed to see dynamic forms and colors relationships that would offer compelling visual elements for a painting.
I began by envisioning only a dress, but gradually saw the benefit of adding a second layer to the garment, in the interest of contributing additional colors and forms. Initially, I thought that this second layer could be a simple shawl over a two-tone dress, as in the early colored pencil and pastel sketches below:
Eventually, the shawl became more like a cloak, and acquired a hood. I considered shorter and longer varieties of such a cloak, as in the two examples below:
Eventually, this led to a fully-developed, hooded cloak, with long, draping sleeves fixed below a separate upper layer, whose front surface would split into an inverted v-shape; this split would allow for wider extension of the wearer's arms and would also provide an expanded view of the vertical drapery of an underlying dress. With this design established in a simple charcoal drawing of a generic model with arms extended, I photographed the drawing and then turned to digital rendering with Photoshop to apply a variety of potential color combinations over the same general outline, as in the four examples below:
The design was largely inspired by traditional cloaks of Ireland, and I wanted to preserve a certain Celtic quality in the garment, even utilizing buttons and other accessories that feature Celtic knots and similar designs of Irish or Scottish origin. But traditional Irish cloaks tend to open down the front and remain closed along the sides, allowing the wearer to extend her arms only toward the front, and this restricts the model to vertical, columnar poses that aren't especially dynamic for pictorial purposes. I needed my models to be able to reach out to both sides and to hold walking sticks and other props, allowing for a wider variety of interesting poses. For that reason, I developed my own design with sleeves that open along the sides. Ultimately, the final result looked like this:
For more detail about the development of this first garment, please follow the link below:
Part II: The First Cloak from Start to Finish
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