Wearable Art
Amy Attwood
Hamilton Girls' High School
Year 12 Technology, Fashion Design, 20 weeks
Teacher: Jenny Mangan
Amy's major Year 12 project was created to be part of the NZ Secondary Schools' Young Designer Awards. Amy has a passion for Wearable Arts and quickly decided this category would be her focus.
Amy had been highly successful in competitions over past years, so she analysed feedback and evaluated her previous outcomes as well as other successful outcomes in Wearable Art competitions.
She found that the use of a theme was an important factor, and, with the category description 'Fantasy', she decided to investigate fairy tales. Inspired by the Rumplestiltskin story, she developed the concept of depicting its storyline within the costume design.
Her final outcome depicting the Rumplestiltskin story has the costume made in two halves - 'rags to riches'. A spinning wheel head-piece, with a macrame cloak woven through it and falling to the floor, represents the spinning from fibre to yarn.
Amy was proud of her final outcome, particularly when it was selected as sixth in the national finals and modelled in the Awards ceremony. Amy said the hardest thing was all the problem solving and trialling she had to do to achieve the right image within tight time constraints. An ongoing challenge was sourcing suitable materials at no cost and dying fabrics to achieve the required colour.
Another challenge was designing a head-piece which would support the spinning wheel and balance it safely on the head. After sending the costume in, Amy was told that the head-piece was too heavy and therefore unsafe. Amy felt it was critical to the design, so she made a lightweight replica using spray painted polystyrene.
Amy is now attending Bay of Plenty Polytechnic where she is doing Fashion Design.
Teacher commentWorking with alternative materials involved a huge technological knowledge and skill component; Amy had to consider how to use the rigid and Soft Materials so that the model could move comfortably in it.
Amy is a very creative thinker and if something doesn't work she finds a way around it, she's always experimenting, trialling and discussing possibilities.
