A collection inspired by some random people

As I had already gained a lot of material from my research I decided it I was now ready to go straight into designing. I noticed that I had a lot of quite complete and well developed design ideas in my research sketchbook already, and they all seemed to have a strong theme. 

The emerging theme seemed to be the connotations of working class culture. Ciaran's jacket has strong connotations of 20th Century working class youth rebellion. He explained his dad used to be an anarchist but is now ironically a policemen, which brought up the theme in my head of youth culture against the police, which is extremely relevant in modern Britain, particularly after the London riots in 2011 and the fact that the newspapers are always full of stories of youth crime.  I also featured a lot images of young people wearing tracksuits, which are the stereotypical outfits of violent youths. This made me think about how young people in tracksuits have become a very threatening, frightening image of modern society, which effectively makes 'chavs' and 'hoodies' the punks of the 21st century as they are the contemporary youth rebellion that send shock-waves across the older generations. 

I also looked quite heavily at workman's uniforms, and used them as design inspiration. Being a workman is a stereotypically working class profession, so this made me notice quite a strong theme emerging. At this point, I have also noticed that although I originally intended to be a womenswear designer, my project has so far been very masculine as it has featured a lot of strong male stereotypes. This could either work well as a contrast or I may decide to do menswear as a final outcome. 

My other main source of inspiration was homeless people, which is nasty as it sounds, right at the bottom of the scale of social class. I really want to explore and develop this theme as I think the idea of glamorising something which is the complete opposite could be very interesting. If I made some garments inspired by homeless people I would like to use quite expensive looking fabrics, and make it quite sleek and sophisticated looking for an extreme contrast.  

This is the introduction page of my design sketchbook. I selected the people who's personal style inspired me the most to feature on it. I wanted to show where my initail design ideas came from. I wrote "A collection inspired by some random people' in a bold, clumsy colourful font as it reflects the aesthetic I wanted to create for this collection. By writing some 'random people', I wanted to emphisase the ordinaryness of the people that I was using as inspiration.