Course Description:
blueprints of fashion, patterns are the fundamental conceptual building blocks for producing clothes. However fatuous today’s fast fashion cycle might appear, dress does not function in a social or political vacuum. As aesthetic objects that accompany us on a daily basis, clothes inform and mediate our everyday embodied experiences as social beings. During the early 20th century, designers developed many of the modernist cuts that still constitute the shapes of vernacular dress today. Modernist designers radically re-invented the formal vocabulary of dress by aesthetically re-evaluating aspects of garment construction through new paradigms of geometric economy, functional utility, and dynamic mobility. In applying Euclidian principals to drafting two dimensional patterns on the planes of fabric, avant-garde designers explored the transformations between two- and three-dimensional properties of textiles. In turn, they explored how the warp and weft of fabrics could be manipulated in motion through the bias of their constitutive one-dimensional, linear components – threads. Taking apart the garments of the 1920s and 1930s into their pattern components reveals a multi-faceted spectrum of constructivist geometric shapes animated through dynamic designs. But seeing them in context also reveals their underlying political and social instrumentality. As an introduction to pattern drafting, this course explores the sculptural and conceptual fundamentals of modernist design by examining and patternprototyping the fashions in and around the historical Bauhaus during the 1920s and 1930s.
The course will be organized through a series of hands-on workshops interspersed with brief Lectures on modernist design & dress history. These look at changes and innovations in everyday dress of the Bauhaus era (1919-1933); the historical Weaving Workshop and Textile Class; Oskar Schlemmer & Bauhaus costuming practices; the fashions of the Bauhaus journal ”Die Neue Linie”; pattern and textile design around the Russian Constructivists & VKhUTEMAS; select Parisian/international avant-garde designers. The course will also outline the history of pattern design and ‘fast’ fashion as a product of the industrial revolution; the role of pattern ephemera as a historical medium for fashion dissemination; the evolution of home sewing practices to mass-produced ready-to-wear; and the relationships of these activities to subversive roots of Do-It-Yourself, maker and slow fashion practices as feminist and activist strategies.
Kursinhalte/Classwork:
*Schnittentwurfstechniken / Pattern Drafting Techniques
*Erwerb von Kenntnissen des traditionellen und zeitgenössischen Schneiderhandwerks / learning traditional and contemporary pattern drafting techniques
*Methoden zur Verarbeitung von digitalen Archivalien / methods for working digitally with archival resources
*digitale Reproduktion und Skalierung/Gradierung eines Schnittmusters / digital (re)production and grading of a dress pattern
*Konstruktionsmethoden mit unterschiedlichen Materialien / construction methods with different materials
*Methoden der künstlerischen Recherche / artistic research methods
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