FINITO!

Ivory Tower project is complete!

Here are a few images of the magazine, street art, and some sneak peaks into some photoshoots and other content.

*Artwork by Justin White

*Artwork by Giopet

*Artwork by Linda Wilken

*Artwork by Daniel Caballero 

*Photograph by Tristan Fitzherbert-Smith 

 *Photograph by Tristan Fitzherbert-Smith 

*Artwork by Max Temkin

*Photograph by Louise Kate Anderson

 *Photograph by Tristan Fitzherbert-Smith 

 *Artwork by Louise Kate Anderson

Tomorrow, I give the final presentation of my university degree!
Anyone interested in coming to see the UTS fashion exhibition Future of Fashion Showcase, please contact me.

PRINTING!!! (and web stuff)

So I finally finished designing my Street Art - I'm proud to say it's almost all my own work, I just got a little bit of feedback help with things like fonts and layout.

I got my plates made up the other day at Imagination Graphics. I'm glad I checked everything as (LITERALLY) the last second because my QR codes didn't work!!! Thankfully I was able to fix them in time.

I spent the last two days printing, and got everything done. And let me tell you, 2 colour plates x 160 sheets on our press in 2 days, not to mention chopping them all in half and signing the limited edition of 12 - is not an easy feat!!!

Here's a bit of a documentation of the process:

Choosing my ink colour for the fountain (and making sure the middle mixes to a nice purple):

Putting the ink on the inking rollers:

Getting the plate all ready and properly dampened:

First print, colour no.1:

Day Two: Black Ink

Plate no. 2: Black plate

Sorting out some "too much water" issues:

Drying on print racks:

Sorting out some registration issues:

Chopping!

And some videos to explain the whole process (excuse the dodgy "self-camera" work)

*Images & videos all mine.

And that's the printing.

Website work has been a whole new world for me. I've never built a wordpress before and suddenly I've had to look up things like CSS codes. I think it's looking pretty good though! Don't you?

Thanks to Lucas Ihlein for all the help.

Putting up Street Art Posters

So I've been working lately at the Street Art part of my major project. Printing my posters should go ahead in the next 2 weeks.

Although I'm not some company using the streets of Sydney to advertise, I'm a little concerned about the locations I choose to put up my posters. I've done some research on the City of Sydney's bill posters policy. Part of my project does involve some "guerilla" activity, but I don't particularly want a $1500 fine, and more so, I want to get my message across which won't happen if the council just tears down my posters.

I'm going to use places that already have posters on them, so it probably won't annoy anyone too much. Furthermore, the council has proposed the following areas:

I may also try to get permission from UTS & USYD to put a couple of posters up too.

As for how to put up posters, many people use wheat glue but I was thinking of mostly using tape.

Photoshoot - Sunday

So, a last minute change in plans for Sunday has seen me ask everyone I know about interesting locations in Sydney for fashion shoots. For my current concept I was looking for something interesting, but not too busy. And not a ocean/ beach scape. Cockatoo Island would be PERFECT if not for the thousand current biennale visitors. I'd love to do a shoot there for fun one day though. Must put that on the list of things to do post- December.

If anyone remembers, this is the shoot where I'm deleting the body from the frame. A little like this:

I had the idea just yesterday to have the model create a high contrast shadow behind her which will stay in the photos once the body has been edited out. Kind of like an echo.. or something metaphorical like that.

I've decided on Ballast Point Park. One of my writers recommended it and I remembered that my friend Mara Page took some shots there once. So I did a location scout today. The clothes are very earth-y colours, and I think it works well with the location.

*All the rest of the photos are mine.

And thanks to my awesome friend Kathleen Moodie, I borrowed some Fleur Wood clothing. Styling the outfits was tricky because they all need sleeves of some kind and I can't have jewellery over skin or it would be too hard too edit. I still have to buy socks of some kind for the coral shoes (too hard to edit the square cut out bits of the shoes).

(the flash makes the clothes look bad but they're actually very pretty silks and cottons!)

 And that's that! I'm semi-nervous, semi-excited about Sunday!

Cartoon Collaboration

I've met with my cartoonist Justin White a few times now, we brainstormed a lot of ideas and he's running with some mock-ups to show me. It's been tricky getting the balance of satire and intellect without being crude or derogatory.

I came up with some paradoxes I see in the world of fashion/ beauty:

- Designers using a size 8/10 mannequin to design for the Australian female (average size 14).- People are more likely to buy fashion if they see it worn by a person whom they have something physically in common with.
- Fast fashion's flaw: how do you design something good, and make it obsolete when the new season comes around?
- The paradox of selling fashion to females through sexualised images of females.
- How can the standard of beauty sit so far away from what a human being is biologically programed to find attractive & healthy?
- Women shave/ wax their body hair but them wear fur.- Gender differences - men desire to be a size/ weight that is attractive and generally healthy & women, despite feminism, find a "fragile" body attractive.
- Androgynous designers who still put their female models in high heels.
- Trying to help women's low self esteem by putting an un-retouched image of a supermodel on a magazine cover.
- Chain stores who lower all their sizes so that a normally size 10 woman will want to buy a dress because the size 6 fits her.
- The fashion designer's "legacy" - where to place the button on a shirt is of great importance to the world.
- The idea brought up on Seinfeld - models being counterproductive to the fashion industry - with all these beautiful women, who's looking at the clothes?
- Pun on highly conceptually driven fashion that looks exactly the same - "I wonder if my profound feelings on the fragility of human life are evident in the drape of this fine silk fabric?"


Then together we came up with these ideas for cartoons:

- A woman deciding between two dresses (in a chain store), and the deciding factor in her choice was that in one of them she fits into the size 6.

- Two magazines side by side with images of child models, exactly the same, only on one, there's a blurb which says "un-retouched image".

- A group of designers looking at a line of auditioning female models, and deciding they don't like any of them, and then end up choosing the male intern - comes from the idea of Andrej Pejic, the androgynous model.

- A calendar showing trends in fashion, "yellow is the new black", then "tartan is the new yellow", progressively getting more ridiculous.

- A world which has adapted to fit in with fashion, namely doorframes for specific headdresses.

- A cardboard cutout placed slightly on the side with the caption "celebrity finally reaches goal weight".

- Or a cardboard cut out with a model, and a woman who looks exactly the same, in the same clothes looking at it saying "I wish I looked like her".

- Cars with prints the same as people's clothing, perhaps the same as some printed jeans that are popular at the moment?

- Bears wearing human skins and other bears protesting about being "anti-skin".

Fashematics

My cartoonist told me about Fashematics. A satirical blog which collates images to parody catwalk fashion.