Fat Face GFW Competition

Hello! Welcome to my first blog post. Make yourself comfortable. In January and February 2018, I decided to enter a competition in Graduate Fashion Week that's held in London. The competition was to design a menswear graphic tee, which if you are chosen, it will be printed and dispersed into stores around the UK.

Having done some Print in first year at uni (I am currently studying Textiles, specialising in knitwear), I decided to give it a go and enter. It's good experience to respond to a brief, and I could also put it on my CV.

Mood Board

My initial inspiration for the entry was my trip to Iceland early in January, before I began this competition. The main ethos of the theme was to convey the crisp, cold beauty of Iceland in winter and the amazing time I had exploring as much I could of the island. I decided to take some images found on Pinterest, as well as my own images and make my mood board. After finding the colours of Fat Face's tees on their website, I used that as a starting point along with manipulating some of my own images on Photoshop. You can see in the image above how I manipulated these images, grasping key colours and incorporating Fat Face's key themes throughout this exploration.

Research Board

Throughout my market research, I looked at not only Fat Face, but also BillaBong and Mountain Warehouse to grasp a better idea of what menswear for outdoors and high intensity leisure look at for aesthetic. I found many illustrations of vehicles, as well as images of outdoors. Great! I'm following the right lines. I also really wanted to define my customer, and for that I thought of a family-orientated, outdoorsy, hands-on dad. I didn't want to stick to stereotypes, but it's what came to my mind. So here we are.

Final Design

After looking at the manipulations I made on Photoshop, combined with the images and research I found on Pinterest and other brands, I came up with seven final designs. I was important for the competition entry to show them as flats, which I personally really enjoy creating. My final designs include; an image I took of one of Iceland's national parks with a 1960s VW campervan placed on top. (I noticed Fat Face love their campervans). The second is another image I took whilst in the beautiful national park, however in order to gauge a unique aesthetic, I placed two images beside each other with two different edits- and turned down the opacity on each in order to create a offset feel. I then wrote "Road Trippin'" as I felt this was a fun spin on the design. The next design is me having edited the imaged of the campervan and switched up the colours to match their original t-shirt colour range. The final four designs are manipulated images of landscapes to highlight specific colour schemes. The last three are all the same image, which is my own.

I asked various men in my life (disclaimer- men meaning my dad, boyfriend, his brothers and his dad) to tell me which design they personally preferred and would wear themselves. From this, they chose the design that I chose as my final design submission. I agreed with them on this, it showed the most skill and diversity of all of my inspiration whilst using all of the key themes. I then proceeded to explain how this t-shirt would be made, and why I chose it. I really love the colours in this design.

Unfortunately, my submission was not taken further after I submitted my entry. I was disappointed as I had put a lot of time and effort into it whilst juggling my second semester of third year. However, I did learn a lot throughout this in terms of how to create a small collection in a small time frame. I became more inspired with my condensed inspiration and enjoyed playing with the images I took in Iceland when I was there weeks before. I learnt more about Photoshop and uncovered skills that I did not know I had, as well as opening my eyes to a completely different style to what I have done in university.

The submission requirements asked for Pantone colours, and as I did not have access to those, I wrote the RGB colour codes instead. For all I know, this could be the reason I wasn't shortlisted, however I won't let that stop me from entering more competitions as I really enjoyed this one.