TRENSETTERS London Trip

TRENDSETTERS

Printed Textiles, research based project brief With its rich popular culture, London is often thought of as the World’s exploding point for new trends.

This research based project, asks you to identify trends, explore inspiration and investigate relevant links with your work.

You should also focus on unidentified new trends, these can be found in the most unusual places. Sometimes, it’s films (remember the impact of Moulin Rouge on the fashion industry); sometimes it’s music, graphic design, the theatre, urban culture or a current exhibition.

THE BRIEF

The aim is to collect visual information from all aspects of popular culture – based around your project theme and print designs. This should cover music, graphic design, illustration, product design, film, theatre, current exhibitions (painting, photography, all aspects of fine art) and advertising. These are some of the areas where ideas filter through into textiles and fashion/interiors.

What you should not do is cover current trends in fashion/interiors or textiles. The aim of the research is to look for new ones by keeping in touch with popular culture and entertainment. Look in ‘Time Out’ magazine, Rough Guides, The Evening Standard, colour supplements in weekly newspapers etc, these will provide you with information of what is going on, as well as inspiration. It is up to you to collect visual research from a variety of places. But they MUST relate to CURRENT popular culture.

Try to collect information from as wide variety of sources as you possibly can. Inspiration, ideas and trends can come from the most unexpected places…. Remember that this London trip will also involve a trip to the fashion print studio; you should use this opportunity to learn as much as you can about the industry, trends and how the trends of the future are identified.

The research and information gathered on this trip, together with your primary research gathered over the summer should directly inform your collection.

You should aim to see at least one ‘out of the ordinary’ aspect of London culture, something that may not have obvious links with Textiles or Fashion, but that can inspire and inform you to experiment and develop a interesting and eclectic collection. You should also research and record aspects linked to your own work following on from your summer work and the studio brief.

Christian Boltanski

Essai de reconstitution (Trois tiroirs) Attempt at Recreation (Three Drawers)], 1970-1971
Formerly Trois Tiroirs (Three Drawers).
A tin-plate chest containing three drawers held shut with wire netting, each sporting a label and containing various objects.
This three-drawer tin-plate chest epitomises Boltanski’s early ventures into the theme of lost child hood. He wrote his first book, “Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon enfance, 1944-1950” (Investigation and presen tation of all that is left of my childhood, 1944-1950) (1) in 1969.
He originally only published 50 copies of this book which was, in a way, an attempt to recreate a period of his childhood and present the result as a work of art. Its nine pages contain a school photo and essay, and keepsakes that remind us of the bits and pieces we might have stored away caringly in cardboard boxes.
Trois tiroirs is a similar – but more three-dimensional recreation. The drawers contain plasticine objects replicating things which, as the typed labels on each drawer tell us, Boltanski probably had as a child (planes, a hot-water bottle and so on). They are his way of reminding us of those inconsequential treasures we prized and cherished as children.
This recreation also captures something of the earnest seriousness that childhood games somehow involve, making it both funny and endearing.
It also foreshadows a series of archive works that Boltanski produced in the 1980s (2). Those, again, feature the same tin-plate chests full of unpretentious, commercially worthless objects encapsulating an undeniably huge wealth of private emotion-steeped memories.