Workshop a cura di Olivia Hegarty

Fashion design today is very much influenced by our beliefs as individuals. If we look at fashion shows, we can see that the creations are often about the designer himself. Sometimes people can be indifferent to this (it can happen with any artwork), as if art should not be ‘corrupted’ by ethical intentions. What if we thought of human values as a resourceful experimental method for design development?

This is the focus of Olivia Hegarty’s workshop ‘VALUES-LED DESIGN’. Hegarty is a fashion designer and consultant and Unit Leader at London College of Fashion. This workshop aims to give students a new critical approach to the design of garments and collections. Participants work in groups to create value sets through a workshop process.

First of all, students are asked to think about the brands they like and why they like them, reflecting on the relationship between their taste and their vision. Then there is a brainstorming moment, where they collect the common values and put them all together in a pyramid diagram. Looking at the diagram, they arrived at a number of important verbs (such as “to fly”, “to reduce”, “to combine”…). They finish the theoretical part of the workshop by transforming these verbs into materials. Now the practical work begins! The printed images are all the participants need to create the shapes, and then make clothes out of them. The atmosphere is vibrant, the background music keeps playing and the desks are full of hands cutting, moving, gluing…

Ada Senelli