Making a Fashion Base

As I will be focusing mainly on the design side of fashion, I decided to create a fashion base. I looked around on the internet for inspiration and suggestions on how to make one. There was one main theme throughout the most popular ones I saw, and that was that they were tall, thin with elongated arms, legs and bodies.
The body and limbs are longer to draw attention to the clothing design.
This was my process in making my design base. From left to right. I will be using this base to create most of my punk designs on.

Pinterest

A Pinterest mood-board of visual Kei fashion: http://pinterest.com/hateincarnate/visual-kei/

Visual Kei artists

Although many designers incorporate punk into their designs and collections the most iconic or punk like clothes were personalised by hand and specific to the individual. In keeping with the punk theme of "home made", and "I don't care."And aside from the various rock bands there isn't really a clear indication as to where the fashion movement originated from.




There is a more distinguished origin of Visual Kei as a fashion trend. The Visual Kei band "X Japan" is often given credit for starting the whole craze. The drummer Yoshiki is said to have been the leader of the rise in Jrock sales. Without them the Visual Kei trend would not exist.

Although we know the clothes were worn by this band we are not certain just WHO within the band made them. But we know that they paved the way for other Visual Kei bands, and even helped spreading it to the western world by organising a festival in America called "Jrock Revolution".

It's not just the clothes that make visual kei unique, the wacky hair styles and colours similar to those within punk also feature in the style. As well as the excessive makeup. Some of the most iconic make up being worn/created by Hitsugi from the band "Nightmare." His intricate makeup and many facial piercing make a brilliant example for visual Kei makeup style.

Visual Kei - Japans answer to punk

Visual Kei (Also known as "visual shock") is a japanese punk inspired fashion trend. It centres mainly around music genres (as does regular punk) though more specifically Glam rock/punk
, Punk rock and Heavy metal. However some people maintain that you don't have to like the music to like the fashion but the same can be said of regular punk fashion.








Visual Kei was first seen around the 1980s just as regular punk was, with some of the pioneering visual kei bands being X Japan, Colour, D'erlanger and Buck-Tick. Although Visual Kei has been around since the 80s it didn't grow in popularity until the 1990s. Only at this time did visual Kei bands become a regular and high selling music type.

Although other japanese music types remain the most popular (Mainly J-pop) the fashion industry in japan changed dramatically after the rise or Visual Kei.  And even the western world has somewhat embraced the wacky fashion sense.

Pinterest

I have been using the site Pinterest to make some online mood-boards relating to some aspects of my theme.

So far I have made a board dedicated to Art movements over the last 100 years: http://pinterest.com/hateincarnate/art-movements/

A brief look into the types of fashion illustration I may use for inspiration and guides throughout my project:  http://pinterest.com/hateincarnate/fashion-design/

And a look into punk fashion (That being my main theme): http://pinterest.com/hateincarnate/punk-fashion/


By gathering images from both the site and the rest of the web I can keep all of my ideas and inspiration in one place, that is both easy to access and easy to alter/add to as I progress throughout my project.

Good Sites vs Bad Sites

Websites,
 whilst mostly whether you consider a website to be good or bad is based on personal preference, there are somethings that every website needs to be considered at least adequate:

Working features
 A reason for being
And a good design

One of the most annoying things about a website, is having a feature that doesn't work. Whether it be a button, a link or  widget. Nothing angers a visitor more than something completely pointless.

Another thing a good website needs is a reason for being. Having a website that is completely pointless and useless is tremendously stupid. Or having a website that does everything another website already does again is completely pointless.
If you intend to make a website you better have a good idea of what you are going to do with it.

And finally a good design is crucial. Without a website that is pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate no one will be interested. You may have the best reason for creating a website but if people can't figure out how to use it... They won't!


Good Sites:

In my personal opinion an example of a good website is Deviantart.com. Although there are disputes about it's community the design for the site itself isn't that bad. And no one can deny the number of people that go on that site helps to prove that this site has it's good points. It was one of the first and most popular art sharing sites on the web.
The layout is fairly simple to grasp and mostly everything on there does exactly what it is supposed to do. All in all not a bad site.


Bad Sites:

I could list a million bad sites, some simply because I don't like them personally, but there are some that just don't deserve to be called websites. Filled with spam, broken links and just terrible layout and designs.
But I have chosen to share one that most people with have experienced.... Facebook.

Now I do not deny that this site is hugely popular and has many good points just as deviantart, But the millions of spam features, the ads, the spam emails, and constant changing of the layout confuses and frustrates many of the sites users.

Whatever your preferences no one can deny that with websites spam and constant changes to the layout that don't make sense and are filled with bugs are not what the ideal website should consist of.

Book Review: 100 Years Of Fashion Illustration

The book 100 Years of Fashion Illustration by the author Cally Blackman, was published in 2007 by Lawrence King Publishing in association with Central Saint Martins College of art and design.

The book contains many images of different fashion illustrations and fashion related art.  Ranging from photographs, to digital work, to simple sketch designs. The layout mainly consists of one image per page and a lot of white space.
There is a little information at the bottom of each image describing the artists motives behind the drawings (If there was any notable information) and the techniques and materials they used to create each piece of art.
Some, however are severely lacking in information, There is not a whole lot to be learned from this book. It is mainly just a gathering of information. I suppose for research purposes this book is very simple and quick to grasp. So this is the main thing I will take away from reading this book. I may chose to research further into some of the artists within it.

The images are more helpful than the information. I believe I can use them to create my own designs, as inspiration and guidlines.  I intend to draw my own designs based off of my punk theme.
Looking into all the different ways of presenting this fashion to the public has been very helpful.