I haven’t posted anything since my semester post-mortem, so I thought I’d start up my What I Wore Today posts again. Lately I’ve been interning at Honor, an NYC label that is pretty new. So far I am enjoying it! Everybody is friendly and I’ve been doing some fun stuff. Things are pretty busy, since they are getting ready for Fashion Week in February, and it seems like they might be cutting things really close. I wonder if that is an industry standard…

Anyhow, I wore my new Uniqlo J+ down jacket. I got it for less than half price, I believe. It has 3/4 wide sleeves and interesting construction. For example, it does not have an armhole seam and instead has a single dart on top of the shoulder and a panel on the underside of the arm! The hood looks like a fun collar when down, and the fact that it is down makes it super warm. AND although it is down and puffy, the outside is a wool blend twill, so it isn’t shiny and static-y on the outside. Genius! It’s too bad that this is Jill Sander’s last J+ collection with Uniqlo.

I was also wearing this jacket last night when I went to meet Noam for dinner. I stopped for a moment to look into a little restaurant on 30th, and a man came up and asked me if I liked vegetarian food. I said I did, and he suggested we go into the restaurant and eat together. I told him I was unfortunately meeting a friend for dinner already, and he launched into a diatribe about how “my people” are prejudiced. Somewhere in there he complimented me on being “tall for an Asian” and having long hair, the appreciation of which he punctuated by reaching out and pushing some of it off my face. “Don’t touch me, dude,” I replied. He started to say something like “See? You people are prejudiced,” and I decided the best course of action was to roll my eyes before walking away.

The sad part of this story is that I know for a fact that this would never have happened if I were walking with a man. The reason is that if a man were with me, there would be a high chance in this person’s mind that I “belonged” to the man. Since I was unaccompanied, it meant I was free for the taking (and apparently, the touching). And when I declined his advances and enforced my personal boundaries, I was “being prejudiced” against him. And that, ladies and gents, is why I am a Feminist. Because I want to be able to walk in the fucking street at night, and stop in front of a restaurant or shop without having someone try to lay claim to me. AND accuse me of being prejudiced just because I don’t want to have dinner with a stranger, when I already have plans with a friend! UGH

Parsons’ Fashion AAS is fairly challenging, even for someone who comes from a studio environment. In my undergrad I would regularly pull all-nighters between one and three times per week. I was also working on the weekends. My current school experience has been much better even though I have more classes, either because I am more organized, or simply because I have two extra days to do homework (perhaps a mix of the two). In any case, I didn’t have to pull any all-nighters until the last week. If you count an hour and a half as real sleep, then I only did 1 all-nighter. Woo!

I have some fun things to show for it though. I didn’t have to do much in the way of drawings, but I had to compile a portfolio of the work I’d done throughout the semester for my Drawing 2 class. The first parts are development, starting with marker gestures and moving towards line and then colour. The designed garments are 6 pc mini collections arranged by type, with the aim being to accurately represent fabric weight, colour, texture, pattern, and drape. The first group is summer casual, the second is fall/winter, the third is eveningwear, and the last was the “final exam” collection, which was a workwear collection for a woman who works at an art gallery or museum of my choice, for the season of my choice. I decided on a slightly older woman (30+) who works in a Klimt museum, who makes $70,000/year and spends most of it on clothes. The collection is for fall, and is a luxurious reinterpretation of the traditional clothing of the Sami people, known for reindeer farming in the Laplands regions of Sweden and Finland. For serious.

FD2 Portfolio PDF

I also sewed three garments of my own design. For my draping class, I decided I wanted to do a cape even though we had never learned this. We had done a bodice and a circle skirt however, and I figured it was somewhere in the intersection of these two. The part that gave me the most trouble was the hood, which I wanted to be really full. I also decided I wanted it to fall back over the shoulders like a capelet, which meant that I had to continually check the shape while it was up and down. I also had to make a head for my dress form. In the end I had to look at the hood on someone’s coat and try to emulate it, because it was just too difficult for me to figure out the shaping. I wasted two days trying to make my original capelet design work into a hood, before scrapping it entirely because I was running out of time. I scrapped a few design and finishing details simply because it took me SO LONG to sew the thing. One might feel that a cape, having only 9 pattern pieces, would take but a few hours to complete. Believe me, I felt the same way. Until I realized that the bulkiness of the fabric meant I could not plain seam much of anything at all.

I used a wool/cashmere blend double-cloth, which means it is two fabrics that are woven together with a third weft. So every seam had to be lapped; the pieces were sewn correct side to wrong side, then I had to pull apart the two layers of the double cloth, trim the underside layer, then fold and press the top layer over to a 1/4 inch and edgestitch the fold down. Each seam took me HOURS as a result, and also the thickness of the fabric meant I could not use pins to hold down the fold. I had to rip out several stitches and redo them because I didn’t catch the fold underneath, or the fold didn’t lay right and resulted in ugly bumps in the seam, or the stitching just plain looked horrible. Someone had suggested to me that I hand-baste it down before sewing, which probably would have saved me time in the long run, but I was tired and just wanted it to be finished. Some of the seaming doesn’t look so great as a result… But overall, I think I did a fairly good job. I also had to do this for my sewing class, which meant I had to have certain finishes applied. It had to have a facing and a closure of some kind, so I faced the neckline and front extension, and I have a button (no buttonhole though, sadly). The hood/capelet is also zip-off, with a very nice gold-tone zipper.

For patternmaking, I made a pencil skirt with a high slit and giant side pocket, and a cutout top. Sadly, my patternmaking teacher collected the patterns for grading, and I won’t get them back until after the winter break. This is regrettable, because I’d like to make a lining for my skirt and I don’t feel like drafting it all over again (though I could trace off my muslin). Here’s a preliminary pic for now, but I can take some more with different views when I have more time. We all had to design, pattern, and sew a skirt or full look to our own measurements. Here I am with my lovely classmates Minh-Cheun and Ruthie, decked out for our final project fashion show:

Despite the stress, I had a really good time learning all this stuff But I’m definitely ready for a break.

I used a NASA photo for the dress. Now that I’ve discovered the astronomy photo of the day, my life will never be the same.

I don’t have time to make this, but I really wish I did. Maybe I will do this as part of a capsule collection. I want to do a mini collection based on my Shadow Empress story, and have all the outfits based on characters you might find in the Shadow Empress’ court as she marches across the shadow lands to collect the rainbow crystal.

Previously I did a Scout and the Empress, but now I have added a Shaman/Necromancer. Maybe a Wizard or something. Why you’d have a court necromancer, I do not know. But I’ve never been a Shadow Empress so there is likely a lot of stuff I don’t know about who would be in the court of one.

I am thinking of making the mask a paper-craft thing, and am trying to enlist the help of someone who is much better at visualizing things in 3d (Alex). He said “That sounds easy,” so I guess it means he is willing to help I tried to think of how to make the skull of an ibex into a planar thing, sort of like the paper animal project we had to do in my undergrad. But I don’t think what I’ve drawn is descriptive enough. I will have to play with paper to find out the possibilities, most likely.

My shaman drawing has a distinct character design slant rather than the fashion illustration thing I’ve been trying to develop. I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. My whole angle regarding why I am valuable to the fashion industry is my video game background, and interest in concept art. Nobody else in my program is bringing that to the table, as far as I know; the only other person with a solid art background is an animator, and her style is much more loose. If I were to describe our styles, I would say she is Virtuoso (everything looks totally effortless and pretty) and I am more technical. My style is less pretty and floaty and more solid; I tend to like my figures to have weight and strength, like they’re using their muscles. But I really admire Fay’s work and I want to work on bringing that Virtuoso quality of hers into my own illustrations. I think the difference between us is that I’ve done 10,000 drawings in my lifetime, and she’s done 1,000,000.

In my opinion, Parsons’ Fashion program would benefit from a bit more technical drawing instruction. I appreciate their whole Ultimate Freedom drawing style that they push, which means I never spend more than 20 minutes on a drawing from gesture to rendered finish, but that is because I already have a good idea of exactly where to put all my marks. Instructions like “there are no rules for it, you just have to get a feel” are not useful for someone who doesn’t already have an significant figure drawing background. For people whose past degrees are in Finance or Poli Sci, you just need to know that the knee is roughly 3 heads from the hip. You need to have a box to play in before you can think outside it. I can stylize my drawings and “have a feel” for where knees go and how long legs should be in proportion to a body because I know how to draw a body with purposeful proportions. If you never give someone proportions to aim at and let them achieve it, they never learn to control where anything goes! Maybe if being in the industry doesn’t work out for me, I will be a fashion illustration teacher and make my students learn anatomy.

check out those finishing techniques!

It has a Hong Kong edge finish on the waistband, and is fully lined. It even has a sexy back vent:

This pattern is a little bit bigger than I am, but once I am done my personal sloper I will be able to make patterns for myself!

This is based on the Lotus War series by James Jean. I was talking with Alex about chest pieces, and my fondness for tattoos but inability to think of something that would go with every outfit for the rest of my life. But if I could commit to something, it’d probably be something like this.

There is a long story about how and why I made this, so I will start from the very beginning.

New York City is an amazing place, but I find that the more people you bring together in one place, the less value that is ascribed to each individual. When I first got here, I probably spent $100 on buskers and homeless people, a dollar or two at a time. I had a lot of trouble transferring my funds from Canada to the US, and so for about 2 months I’d been living on my credit card and stopped using cash. So I stopped giving. I had to steel myself against guilt.

For a month, my schedule was pretty open and I had lots of time to lay in the sun, see my new friends, sleep and eat properly. When school hit, this changed. Largely because I started at a major disadvantage and had to struggle to catch up, but also because taking 8 or 9 classes is simply ridiculous. I made new friends at school, and I am making new friends now. But making real friends takes time. You need to put some quality effort into other people to build actual friendship past saying hi to each other and talking about how much school sucks. Friendship is built brick by brick, and there are very few shortcuts past really traumatic shared experiences. So in other words, I’ve been lonely. I’m lonely, and my empathy levels for others have dropped because it is too stressful to care about so many people around me that I don’t even know, people who don’t care about me in return. I am not whining; its just a fact. We can’t care about each other for the same reasons. There is too much to do. We’re all struggling just to meet our own basic needs in balance with school work, and there isn’t space in our brains or spare energy to spend on friendship. And this made me sad. That little knot of guilt from my dropping empathy levels, mixed with loneliness and a lack of real, high quality friendship. All of it was like acid inside me.

So a hole was slowly opening in my heart, a little jagged hole that I couldn’t tell the shape of. My sense of well-being was leaking out of it, slowly but surely. It grew as days went by where I didn’t see the sun much, didn’t sleep enough, ate erratically. I tried to fill the hole with different things and people, but it was like fitting stars into a square. In my frustration I started to hack them apart, trying to change them to suit my needs. I broke off their points where they jabbed me as I tried to force them to make me whole.

But that only hurts me more, and hurts them. I am finding ways to close that hole on my own. You can’t just shatter other people and force them into your heart. They have to stand beside you, whole. But it takes time, you know? To gather people who will stand beside you in their entirety.

I’m sad that I haven’t seen him in a long time, since we are both so busy with school. I miss his emphatic nature. The day that I had to wade through the storm water ocean, Martin, Carmen, and I had been hanging out. Carmen offered to lend Martin her umbrella because he had a really long walk from the subway station. His response was to blurt out “NO!” in a horrified voice, as if it would be inconceivable to borrow her umbrella at her expense. I couldn’t help laughing because it was so unexpectedly sweet, but that is also characteristic of Martin