Zandra Rhodes is a well known fashion designer/icon, her designs represent her love affair with print and colour. From the beginning of her career Zandra has disputed fashion conventions leading the way in experimentation of fabric. Zandra was the first designer to allow the print on the fabric to dictate the end result of the garment. She is renowned for her use of silk screen printing in her designs, she has kept up with modernity using digital print in her sketchbook collection still managing to create her unique style. The sketchbook collection brings Zandra's designs a modern feel, with her hand drawn illustrations transformed into digitally printed garments.
Zandra’s designs are not targeted toward a particular customer or age bracket, she designs for a type. Anyone can wear her clothes if they are young at heart. Zandra’s designs turn what most people would think of as vulgar into a new art form, such as one of my personal favourites the lipstick print.
During my work placement at Zandra Rhodes I have gained an invaluable insight into a historic and genius fashion designer and icons fashion past and present. I got to experience firsthand Zandra’s collection of sketchbooks to find imagery for a current project on China, this was truly inspiring seeing firsthand how she translates her research and creative outlook on the world. One of my first tasks was to draw the print designs for her garments onto her sketches, this was a very difficult challenge as the drawings were so small. Achieving the placement of the print where the fabric fell proved very difficult, as Zandra does not like people drawing her figures this proved a bit of a struggle to me drawing such intricate detailing at such a small scale. I have learnt how to use collages to push print designs further coming up with multiple design ideas and exhausting the different ways a print can be interpreted. From collaging print designs I also learnt how to do a weave technique generating a completely new look combining more than one print design interlinking one another. Among any other tasks I went on errands to purchase fabrics and haberdashery, gathered research from A/W 15 and Pre collections for print direction, adapted prints to make more simplified for IMAX weaves, recreated the design chart indicating how far each design was to send to Zandra so she could keep informed which garments had been made, put prints into Photoshop for a general idea to see how they would register repeated on a garment.
From working at Zandra Rhodes I have gained more confidence in print design feeling I can get extensive ideas in the future with collaging and weaving, scaling up collages and painting in towo colour ways to see how effect the print registers, expanded my knowledge of photoshop allowing me to put together portfolio pages and mood boards, gained an insight into IMAX as print designs using weave. I feel during my time at Zandra Rhodes i would also like to extend my knowledge in pattern cutting, construction and screen printing as i feel it would benefit me for future designing.
