Thursday 6 February 2014

The Storm Before the... Storm (17/10/13)



During the run up to Cardiff Fashion Week the city becomes a hub of all things fashion. Although they may not be visible on every street corner, the hustle and bustle of organising shows, models and exhibitions is well and truly under way and today I have been a part of the set up of an exhibition taking place in the information centre for Fashion week in Royal Arcade.

This has been a multi-layered project. Each year, first year (‘freshers’) Fashion Promotion and Fashion Design students from University of South Wales collaborate to organise, promote and create garments for a showcase runway show in the Atrium campus. This year’s collaboration the Design students designed and created garments from newspaper, a wink to using recycled materials.

In their second incarnation, the garments have gone from catwalk to exhibition in the CFW Information Centre. A team curated by third year students, and installed by third, second and first years, are putting into practice their visual merchandising and promotion skills to create a centre that will be an important hub during fashion week.Today we visited the space in Royal Arcade to begin the set up for the centre. Having once been used as a cupcake shop, it is easy to imagine the blank canvas we had to work with. After four of us managed to carry around 30 paper dresses across town to the arcade we could start to throw around some ideas and start getting things in place.

With the inside of the shop needing an injection of life (and a good clean) the first day in was a mixture of playing Cinderella whilst mopping, polishing and making washing lines out of string whilst selecting some of the most amazing paper dresses, not to forget conceptualising how we want the space to be!The collection is set around the original Freshers’ show name of Pulp. With dresses being clipped up by pegs onto make shift washing lines and draped around the space for visitors to come inside and take a look at the creations whilst finding out all they want to know about Cardiff Fashion Week.

Lucy Ashley



No comments:

Post a Comment