Fit, form and fabric are usually key components of any piece of fashion. But what would you do if you were tasked to make or model a couture gown out of anything but traditional material or textiles?
That’s just the challenge that local design student Chelsea Young faced in her sophomore Fashion Illustration course at West Virginia University.
Young is an incoming third-year student hailing from Saint Albans. When given the assignment — to formulate a design, sketch and create a dress using anything but traditional materials — she was intimidated.
“The whole process was pretty difficult. I completed my sketches prior to choosing materials, so I wasn’t sure how pliable the materials would be, how they would fall on the body or how I would sew them together,” she said.
Adding another layer to the assignment, the professor asked students when choosing materials to utilize a material that had a hometown or a community presence.
It was a no brainer for Young to choose Husson’s Pizza — the family business.
“I asked my mom to send me anything and everything from Husson’s that could possibly be used to make a dress,” said Young.
“She showed up for a visit two weeks later with everything she could find with a Husson’s logo on it. Pizza boxes, napkins, plates, advertisements, and coupons, just to name a few of the items.”
Settling on napkins and paper plates, Young started to construct the dress on a form.
It was, she said, an “intimidating assignment for an already difficult class and a demanding professor.”
Luckily, with a class size of only five people, the professor was incredibly supportive and able to offer plenty of hands-on advice and guidance as she navigated the project, her first ever that actually involved creating the ensemble, not just sketches.
Since the sketch was created prior to receiving materials, Young was forced to make quite a few changes based on the way the plates and napkins fell on the dress form.
Her biggest challenge? Not feeling defeated because the first idea didn’t work.
“Regroup and redesign; I had to reformulate a lot of the original sketch because the materials weren’t working,” said Young.
“The dress turned out nothing like I had originally planned or expected. The only remaining detail from the design sketch was the scalloped edge of the skirt.
“The dress was much more avant-garde than I had intended. I wanted to make it less revealing and easier to wear.”
Mid-way through the assignment and construction, the professor had one last surprise for Young and her fellow classmates.
“I had been working on the dress form, creating a skirt that was almost adhered to the form with no way to get in or out of it,” said Young, “then my professor told me that not only would this ensemble be photographed, it would be photographed on a live model.”
At the time, there was no way to remove the partially finished dress from the form; very reluctantly, the teacher talked her in to cutting the back of the skirt down the center and creating a corset effect for easier removal and fitting on the model.
Then came perhaps the hardest task: creating the skirt.
“In addition to how the fabric lays on the body when standing still, your model also has to walk and sit and move freely under the skirt,” said Young. “There are just so many more things to consider than with a top.”
In looking back on her creation, Young said the only thing she would change is to make it more wearable for different body types. Her model was incredibly thin, as are most models, but Young would like to create more clothing for the masses.
“There is a huge market of people that are not catered to,” she said.
“We are taught that you can be realistic and progressive in fashion design. Not everyone has long legs and a tiny frame.”
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