Norwich Fashion Week: The Designer's Show

The Designer's Show took place on Tuesday 12th of March at Epic Studios and featured work by local designers and students. I managed to bag myself a second-row seat, then sneakily knelt down at the front when the lights dimmed and the models came onstage. There was an amazing variety of garments and accessories on show, and I was particularly impressed with the younger, innovative designers of Norwich.

Here are my favourite photos from the event:

 

 

 

 

 

ALL photos copyright Sophie Elliott 2013 and should not be used without permission.

I can't believe I haven't posted in 3 months. It's not intentional - my final university project has finally arrived, and I have just 10 weeks to finish everything off. Luckily for me, the dissertation part of the deadline has been and gone (I passed!) and now I've just got to focus on creating my zine, Femme Sole, and fundraising so I can have a print run of 50+. The first official editorial, where I collaborated with Midge of Modern Girl Blitz, took place about a month ago, but in order to keep the contents of the zine safe and secret I unfortunately cannot show you these photos. But here's a little preview:

What I can show you, however, are my photographs from this year's Norwich Fashion Week. I've been recruited as a work experience photographer for the Evening News/EDP/Norwich Fashion Week, and have been given assignments for catwalks, events and videos. The first event I attended, IonFashIon at The Forum, was the official launch night for the fashion week, and featured garments and jewellery from local retailers as well as the competitors for a local model contest who showcased their talent on the catwalk. For my brief I was asked to take a video, something I'm not overly confident in particularly as I only had my little Canon 500D at hand. In between video clips, however, I did take some photos. These are a selection of my favourites from the night:

Edits, zines, and work experience.

I finally handed in the first half of my project for the year on Friday. I was fortunate enough to have finished everything the night before, so didn't have the panic of the last-minute rush like a lot of my class mates; that doesn't relieve the stress, however, and even now I am panicking at the mere thought of getting my results in a couple of week's time. Luckily, I finished the first edition of my zine completely on time:

Woohoo! Now, I still have a few things I wanna do to it, so think of this as a draft version - I have an illustrator on board who is gonna fill in the blank pages, and a couple more outfits I wanna shoot with to turn it from a 4-outfit look book into a 30-page zine. I also want to play around with the photos a little bit more, maybe take some photographs to work as busy, patterned backgrounds in the photos where the fabric is quite plain. I experimented a little with my favourite photo of Jude, and am totally smitten with the result. Fingers crossed I can make more photos that look just as awesome!

There are a few things going on at the moment that I can't wait to blog about - next week I have a work experience placement for Bentlys Records where I'll be photographing two of their bands as they perform around the city and then at a gig in the evening. I also have some work experience with the Evening News coming up at a later date! As well as this, I have a job interview tomorrow, after being unexpectedly fired, which I'm pretty nervous about - and on top of that I'm in talks with an up-and-coming clothing brand, to photograph their collection for display in the next edition of Femme Sole! I really can't wait to be able to share all of these photos on here, and I hope whoever is reading this is excited to see some new work too.

Manifesto

First edition is all drafted up, just waiting to see if I can an illustrator involved and figure out how small to trim these bad boys! 

On Friday I was lucky enough to have a shoot with local up-and-coming model Jude Wright, who I've been dying to set up a shoot with as soon as I spotted her a few months ago in a friend's images. We re-shot a few of the images I took a couple of a weeks ago, re-working them and playing with the lighting as well as working with several new dresses.

The first dress we shot with was the same Georgie Gilbert dress as the previous shoot. We revamped the photos by upping the brightness and creating a much more pastel background, whilst keeping Jude bright and sharp. I then used the texture of the dress to add a border to the photos, which works beautifully and really highlights the busy pattern of the dress.

The next dress we photographed was designed by NUCA fashion design student Lizzie Grant. Lizzie's dress was inspired by Japanese kimonos, visible through the beautiful drape of the fabric and loose-fitting, free-flowing arms. Lizzie's dress has taken the traditional perception of a kimono, however, and adapted it to a modern market - tight-fitting and skin-baring, the dress is both comfortable to wear as well as casting a gorgeous, feminine silhouette. We shot with lilac and pink gels on the lights, and again bordered the image using a texture from within the garment itself; this enhances the elegance of the garment, and adds an overall mood to the photograph - whilst the previous dress was busy with pattern, this dress is simple and dainty. 

The final dress we photographed was a 60's prom dress I managed to pick up from my local charity shop for £6. I've been wanting to photograph with it since I bought it, and finally had the opportunity in my shoot on Friday. On Halloween it acted as my 'zombie prom queen' outfit, so we decided to bring out the pouting moodiness once again and make a couple of quite melancholy - though beautiful - images.

Big thanks to Jude for this shoot, and to Becca Mitton for helping with (aka being in charge of) the lighting. I now have a series of works by around 4 fashion students, and so for the end of this short term I'm going to be working on a very small NUCA Fashion Design A/W 2012 Lookbook zine to display this work. Keep your eyes peeled!