The concept of my patterns is about gender. In my opinion, “Gender” is not only about men and women, also represent about culture. The unfair culture, which women have to be feminine, and men have to be masculine. Also, about the changed culture nowadays , which shows the equalization between these two gender, and “neutral” was being respected in the world.
As my concept above, my patterns collection in swatch book are more about the mix feeling of “Female” and “Male”. This feeling is showed in colors combination and pattern designs. The swatch book is required in eight designs, and each of them needs color variation. I used to care more about design and this time, I found if you just change color in the same design, you change the whole atmosphere of that piece. Because I want to show more about “Neutral”, for my color palette I choose to use contrast colors. The patterns I designed all used darker colors with lighter colors, just a little bit contrast, not the kind of contraction which make people feel “Wow!”, because I do not want people feel the unbalance in each of them, like more masculine or too girly. The patterns can be elegant, but with a little power in it. It is also a way to express my concept about gender—be equal. For the patterns,In my opinion, I always insist that geometry is a good way to represent sex, the way to arrange lines and shapes can create magic result and different strong feelings. I used sharp(men) and rounded shapes(women) to be mixed and created a new shape to be my initial little design icon(motif), then inspired from it to create more interesting combination designs.
For the pages’ order in my swatch book, I arranged them from more simple patterns which show gender’s feature more obviously to the completed patterns which show more about androgyny. For the very first pages, If the shape is more about feminine, the color will be more about masculine, they are about the balance between colors and shapes. For the last few patterns, they are more about mixed feeling of both of them, in shapes and colors. I wanted to show maximum androgyny spirit in those patterns, like massive lines on top of delicacy, tender shapes, or neuter patterns in slender, exquisite lines. In those patterns, they are all about complementation of each other, also the support for each other and the balance in each other. For the last pages of garment designs, I choose runway show, vogue style magazine photographs and street snap to give my patterns more wearable possibilities in daily life.
The reason I wanted to design like this is that, after I researched some articles sources about gender culture in recent years, I realized that women getting higher social status and gays and lesbians are being accepted. Even there are laws were came out to protect those neutral citizens. Thus, I wanted to design my “Gender” theme directed more to “Gender-in-the-middle”, which actually represents more about the society in nowadays, especially in New York. Also, because of the tons of research paper online about “neutral” life, I believe to design pattern in this area will bring out more creative ideas and new elements. I have not read so much resources about it, but while I was doing the patterns in the Illustrator software, I read articles as well to get inspirations in the same time, which I felt very helpful. There always have new information in text and photos, for example, I did not only get the knowledge like “new laws”, but also inspired the new ideas from it about making more shaper shapes to show the protection for those helpless people. I usually get inspirations from visual materials, but after reading more and more articles by “forced”, surprisingly, I have to admit, words, books, essays, articles are being more and more helpful to transform academic knowledge in abstract art ideas.
Design needs tons of knowledge to support and develop, like background culture, or even the information about financial world which seems no related to art. I want to end this essay in my mother’s words, which she told me millions of time “ Learning fashion design is great, but if you learning things only about clothes, fashion magazines, supermodels, those kind of things in fashion industry in your whole daily life, you will never develop to higher level.”
