This marks the start of our tenth anniversary celebrations.
One part of our anniversary celebrations is a 10th birthday collection of dresses. This has been a collaborative design project with Art Foundation students at Oxford Brookes University. We decided to team their beautiful fabric prints with blue or black enzyme washed denim to offer an ‘everyday’ dress to be enjoyed for the years to come. All the dresses have been made by our team in India.
It was so exciting working with a team of enthusiastic young adults. I asked Julia what advice she’d give her younger self “I’d encourage myself to stop hesitating and embrace every opportunity that arises, stepping out of my comfort zone to try new things. It’s important to take chances: open doors to memorable experiences and connect with new people. Being part of new things is invaluable.”
The fabric prints came out of a photo-diary project we did with our sewing hub participants in Oxfordshire. Everyone shared photographs of their day-to-day lives, across the mix of cultures and backgrounds we share. The photographs that were used as part of the research as design influences, especially those that linked to the activities we get up to at sewing sessions: the welcome, hospitality and fun we share. Lily shared “ When I was looking at the pictures sent in by the participants, I noticed a recurring theme of nature with lots of flowers, plants, fruit and vegetables. I decided to work on these in watercolour as I felt it depicted a message of positivity and life which seemed to represent the Dorcas Dress successfully.”
Students used the photographs and generated motifs which could be used for their own repeat designs. Ivy commented “The use of people’s everyday lives as source material to inspire ideas was a new way of thinking and completely different to what I’m used to.”
It soon became obvious that the quality of work was overwhelming so we had to honour everyone by including everyone’s work in some way into the designs we chose. We made the decision to combine everyone’s motifs into four final fabric designs. Hazel explained “One thing I greatly appreciated from the project was embracing illustration into textiles. I have always kept them separate so being able to merge the two mediums together and make hand drawn fabric prints was a great way to expand my skillset.”
We celebrated everyone’s achievements at the private view on last Friday. Thanks must go to Cayla Au for all these beautiful photographs.
You can order a dress by visiting our shop.
