SCHOOL IS OUT FOR THE SUMMER

In effort to make my major less of a mystery I thought I would share a few pictures of projects I have worked on this year. The class that is best documented is "studio". I have studio every semester but each class has a different focus. My first semester we worked in small scale windows. This semester we worked with mannequins to prepare us to work in large scale for third semester. I learned more about mannequins than I ever thought there was to know. We covered styling, striking (making a mannequin stand, there is more to it than sticking a rod up its bum), how to best choose a mannequin to sell a garment/product, the process that goes into creating a single mannequin, and much much more but I don't want to bore you. Now some people might call this playing with large dolls... and they might not be too far off.

Assignment 1. We were asked to choose a holiday then expected to style our mannequin according to the holiday. My partner Andy and I chose mothers day. We went with a fifties theme and made her a pregnant housewife.

Sorry about the not so good photos. My professor was taking all the photos and I don't have the disc from her yet.



Assignment 2. Iconic people in history. The challenge of this project is to really make your mannequin become a person it was never meant to be. This assignment is the biggest production of the semester because it is displayed in the main lobby of the school for all to enjoy. I had a lot of fun working on it one because it was really a team effort. After each of us finished styling our mannequins it took a good seven hours to strike about twenty of them on the runways. We had quite an array of icons. Eve (as in Adam and eve), Mr. Rodgers, Amelia Earhart, Audrey Hepburn, Houdini, and Bob Marley just to name a few. I wish I had pictures of the whole show.

My partner Jeaine and I did... any guesses?



Hopefully you can tell by the photos, but we did Pocahontas. The accessory design department gave us two entire suede skins to do with what we want. We sewed a skirt out of one of the skins then made the top out of feather trim and hemp. Most of our Pocahontas inspiration came from the movie A New World. Beautiful movie, you should check it out.

Who wore it best?


Assignment 3. Style a mannequin to sell a perfume. For all the projects we work in partners. Display in the real world is never really a one person job. During the random drawing for who works with who my name was pulled out last making me the odd man out. One girl dropped out so we were uneven. I was excited to be by myself because that meant that I got to call all the shots. During this project I realized one good reason of why she has us double up. Mannequins are extremely hard to handle alone. They are very fragile and are made up of multiple pieces that can fall off and break. Usually one person holds the mannequin as the other dresses, but not this time for Hillary. It was definitely a balancing act but I learned a lot.

So I had Anna Sui Dolly Girl Bonjour l' Amour perfume. I knew I wanted to somehow make a mannequin doll like but had to find the right one. I came across this old shabby all white mannequin that I thought would work, then my professor told me that I could paint it. I researched the Anna Sui image and came up with this.

Here is the before when I had already started painting the lips...
And the after...