Year 10 GCSE Textiles students enjoyed a day of inspiration and creativity at a Fashion Conscious workshop at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where they explored the history of fashion design before creating their own mini mannequins.
The workshop used the V&A’s dynamic and diverse fashion collection, drawing on particular pieces to highlight techniques, key movements, and influential individuals. Students looked at how the change in silhouettes and textiles can be seen as a radical statement against political and social norms.
Two students reviewed the trip:
Alice:
The V&A houses one of the largest national collections with a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. On our visit we focused on the fashion collection which has pieces dating back as far as the 17th century.
Our exploration of the V&A’s extensive collection started with a workshop where we learnt about silhouette and how it has changed and evolved through history following the current events and trends. We then used some of the stranger looking pieces from the furniture collection to inspire us to design our own pieces. We were told to focus on shape, colour, texture and pattern and see which section stood out to us, and to use that throughout our designs. We then explored the fashion collection and continued our designing. We gained inspiration from and adapted the designs of pieces in the collection to fit prompts like, designing for gender neutrality or designing with culture and heritage in mind.
We spent the afternoon exploring the fashion collection on our own time and gaining inspiration that we can take back and include in our own work. We were able to focus on the areas that we found to be interesting. I chose to focus on silhouette and embellishment and see how they were used throughout history. It was very interesting to see the evolution of fashion over the years and see all the sources of inspiration. I’m very excited to see how I can interpret what I found.
Esha:
The Textiles trip to the V&A was a really interactive and fascinating experience. We started the day with a course which taught us about taking inspiration from objects you would not think of and designing clothes based on them and then turning our sketches into 3D models on mini mannequins. We learnt about how a piece can often tell us about the time it was designed in and how it reflected on society at that time.
Later on we went through the fashion collection. This collection is a very comprehensive one and has a variety of pieces from different times and different types of clothing. It was interesting to see how the clothes changed as we got closer to our time now and how the lines between masculine and female designs and clothing started to blur and more designs became gender neutral.
From designing and making mini models on our own to drawing inspiration from the collection at the V&A and looking at different fashion pieces throughout history, this trip was very educational and exciting and I learnt a lot more about fashion designing.
Head of Textiles Melanie Way said: “This workshop was an excellent enrichment opportunity for our Year 10 students, providing inspiration and context for their Textiles studies. All the students thoroughly engaged with the activities on offer and took full advantage of the workshop to develop their work for their GCSE course. The curator, who took the interactive workshop, commented several times on the group’s maturity and creativity.”
