ECA Graduate Collection, The Hidden Kingdom

My Graduate collection, ‘The Hidden Kingdom’ is inspired by ten species of fungi and their marvellous fruiting bodies. Like fungi, my collection doesn’t confide under a certain label. I use techniques and materials that stretch the boundaries of textile and fashion disciplines such as plasma cut copper body adornments. I am making my collection for luxury women’s occasion wear. It includes timeless pieces that embody t he individual wearer and their unique style. I am making my collection for Spring/ Summer 2021. However, I have ‘edited’ the trends that I think my clientele will want to embrace including hardware and accessory trends as well as merely textile and fashion ones. It has an element of bespoke with each piece designed and named after my clientele, however, my collection will be timeless, ageless, and flatter anyone with the ultimate goal of making women feel like the best versions of themselves. It includes a series of manipulated silk garments as well as copper and wood hardware body adornments that can be used as separate jewellery pieces or as styling pieces that sit on top of the silk altering and distorting its natural drape on the body whilst cinching silhouettes in places that flatter the individual wearer for a fashion forward finish that is dramatic yet wearable. My collection celebrates slow, hand craft focusing on quality, authenticity and uniqueness with smocking, pleating, beading, ruffling and indirect prints. It also embraces generated perfection with my soft and sharp digital prints and plasma cut copper. It celebrates the weird and wonderful power of duality- combining, contrasting, juxtaposing, and harmonising handcraft with technology; structure with fluidity; soft materials with hard; ‘edited’ trends with my style aesthetic and my clienteles’; soft focus with sharp; and certainty with ambiguity and the unknown.