5. Designer Research Week 4

30th Aug

This week, I presented Eley Kishimoto as the fashion designers that I find use textiles in an inspirational way, and tried to make a connection between its works and mine.



"Eley Kishimoto is the brand of designers Mark Eley and Wakako Kishimoto. Mark is from Wales and Wakako is from Japan. They are based in London, and have been showing at LFW since 2001. I have chosen three collections to describe their design output based on speculation.



AW 0405 collection
Imagery: Hunters, blood and innocent fawns.
Pattern: English florals, stripes, animal silhoettes. They range from tiny to oversized prints.
Placement: Experimenting the effect of semi circles on the side seams and at the waist. Exaggerated deer head. on bodice.
Texture: Knits, twee, heavy and semi-heavy fabrics.
Colour: Camouflage army colours. leading to crimson blood and primary reds and blues. Light pastels accented with black.
Silhoette: Simple shapes- trenchcoats, turtlenecks, knee-length dresses.



SS 06
Imagery: Astrology, stars and clouds. Pop art.
Pattern: Large phantasmagoric prints, and teeny regularly repeated prints.
Placement:Large print garments made from one single piece of design, while small repeated patterned garments have bits of solid colour accent.
Texture: No physical texture in most collections. Lightweight fabrics- cotton and polyester used in this collection. Green dress seems to have an embossed jacquard texture.
Colour: Primary and neon colours.
Silhoette: Fitted clothing, some structured pieces. A-line dresses, boxy jackets, high-waisted skirts.



SS 08
Imagery: Tropics? Hawaiian flowers, African zig-zag motif, grass, clouds and chains- sailor influences?
Pattern:Irregularly and diagonally-repeated prints. Some non-repetitive prints.
Placement: Garments entirely made of a single printed fabric.
Texture: Lightweight cotton, jersey.
Colour:Some colour ways, bright orange, yellow, parrot green, with hints of black and purple.
Silhoette: Loose-fit garments, straight-cut dresses, flared dresses with an underlayer of ruffles.


From these three EK collections, I think there is an obvious fusion of a bit of Japanese art with Western aesthetics. Some influences of Art deco involved, and they are definitely inspired by everything they come to contact with every day, nothing philosophical.
Their approach is eccentric and simple, there is an emphasis on the use of colour and shapes.
Some outfits have clashing fabrics on the details such as pockets or when layered.


I like EK's cartoon-like use of colour and imagery, as well as the kind of girlish clothes they create. The pictures above show use of trompe loeil which is humourous and use of colours and imagery which i really admire.


I dislike these grandma-like silhoettes. They are stiff coats in patterns and colours I wouldn't immediately recognise as EK's work.


The picture on the left is from an EK-Ellese collaboration. It's got lots of penguins on it, and I think there is probably a parallel between the imagery I have created- the selection fo an animal to work on and repeating it.


I recently tried paper-cutting. The solid shapes and colours are definitely similar to some of EK's work.


This EK dress is printed to look as if its got lots of ruffles. I am interested in creating 3D textures on 2D surfaces.

In all, my work has some parallels to EK's but it isn't clearly evident since I am stilll unsure of my direction. I am going to try and experiment with more textures and shapes as well as placement.

sources: style.com, eleykishimoto.com, V&A museum.