Exterior Artistic Statement
Susie
Wanjing Le
This project, we aim to transform an oxford shirt into our own designed shirt.
My theme of my fashion has always been exaggerate women’s glamor and charm by bringing haute couture, like evening dress and bridal dress in to daily wear, in order to characterize the softness, cuteness, sweetness, fantasy, and romanticism of women. To make this shirt, which is the first garment I ever make, I decided to start with simplicity and cleanness, to combine the sweetness of girls and sophistication of women.
I want to use the white color to address purity and cleanness, the poplin to inherit the character of original oxford shirts. The light-weight of fabric also makes the shape of the garment easy to render. I did research on both historical oxford shirt which from Oxford college in England and contemporary shirt. I found that most cute shirt with girly style and sweetness are normally produced in Asia, especially Korea and Japan. They used lots of gathers and ruffles to address the shape of the body, which makes the garment more feminine and fit. To make it simple, I had the idea of making gathers at the top part of the shirt, and the waist can be contrast in slim shape. And the gathers address the sweetness and temperament of women.
During the process, I made millions of mistakes. For the muslim part, at first, the pattern I made needs some darts to shape the waist and add ruffles at the top. I corrected it twice to manage the actual size. Expect I sewed it with the wrong side for many times with different parts, I didn’t have too much trouble to figure out the tailoring until the cotton fabric part for the project, the yoke turned out too small, I think that might be caused during the process of tracing the pattern in a wrong size. The ruffles firstly came out too short as well. I originally used two times of length for the fabric of ruffle, but the result is that it’s still to short and I need to add more fabric into it. The stand collar ironed with one layer of facing is still too soft so that instead of iron with another facing, I added a layer of lace to embellish the emptiness between neck and collar. Due to limited time, there are still some parts of my shirt I want to revise but don’t have time. For example, the horizon of the ruffles at the front on both sides are not with the same length. That’s a big problem; the reason is that when I sewed it, the seam allowance, which I didn’t draw but measured by the measurement on the sewing machine, was not drew out on shirt, so that the right part has a little shorter in length. The center front where the buttons at are bulky and curvy, that might because of the lightness of the fabric. The gathering of the sleeves at the should are not what I expected, and I want to narrow down the width of should and let the gather be part of the width.
From the whole aspect, the shirt is kind of bulky, not in good shape, though I washed it and bleached it before ironing. I think I need more time to fix all the problems. And due to the first time of try, I made this shirt really slow, it took me too much time on ripper the seam away and redo it. I learned that sometimes I need to pin patterns together first and then sew them together to get a better measurement. And one method from Professor Katz is that use notcher to locate the position, but I was in a hurry so that ignored that. I found out the process if very important to make this shirt, especially details and preparation before sewing all the patterns together.
The biggest improvement for this project is that I learned how to thread the serger and sewing machine, I am very proud of that. And I used the smocking method on the cuff, which I learned from textile class.
To contrast the cuteness of all the ruffles, I used a style of standing collar and horizon smocking to enhance the elegance of a woman. However, the most apparent part, the collar, still contains a layer of lace, which bring it back to a style of girly and romanticism, which is quite my style and things I am always doing. I feel like this shirt is different than others for its more fanciness and cuteness that normally hasn’t been wear in daily like, and I hope people can start to wear styles like this, which cooperating the theme of fashion I said in the beginning, using exaggeration to emphasis women’s elegance and fantasy.