oneP-active
Designers: Deb Cumming and Nina Weaver
Massey University Wellington, New Zealand
Design Exhibit for End of Fashion symposium and exhibition, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, 2016
Digitization is rapidly impacting on traditional modes of fashion design creation. With developing use of fashion software avatars to simulate pattern designs, there are perceptual and technical shifts occurring with alternative developments in pattern and garment methodologies radically altering current methods practiced in the fashion industry. The predominant 2D processes of flat pattern cutting with corresponding front and back pattern blocks derived from a set of measures based on vertical and horizontal axis is shifting to spherical 3D views of virtual bodies and garment pattern design. However Digitization software tools are still yet to acquire the nuanced translation of shaping manipulations and fabric behaviors on the live body. The designs in this exhibit expose the skilled craft of draping on the dynamic body, highlighting curved balance lines in synchronization with fabric grain-lines and performance. The one-piece pattern shapes created to wrap the moving body inform new applications for digital pattern design developments, production with reduced manufacturing, and can provide uninterrupted surfaces with print and smart textile injection. This design work displays an alternative method of design development resulting in a one-piece pattern shape, which views the dynamic body and fabric behavior as an implicit and integral practice. Curved garment balance lines draw the fluid design lines in pattern shaping and print, exposing this pattern process as the design itself.
From Adam Geczy's forward titled Fashion’s Horizons for The End of Fashion exhibition, excerpt on oneP-active:
The language of the negative space, the prototype, the plan, the schema, is a focus of the work by Deb Cumming and Nina Weaver. The series under the title oneP-active deals with the growing trend for the digitisation of pattern design, in their case devising patterns that, when shown in their as yet unrealised two-dimensionality, resemble intriguing abstract shapes. At the beginning of the twentieth century artists such as Laszlo Maholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko would photograph urban sites but from angles that would undermine the narrative content for the sake of abstract configurations. In many ways these works are within this artistic lineage. The final designs are given as icons stressing the dramatic difference between the aesthetics of the original idea and the final result.
This research builds on previous published work of Vionnet, Sevin-Doering and Lindqvist which placed the moving body as central to pattern design. New balance lines are created from defined points of body curvature, dynamic lines of body movement and the strength and stretch in fabric. Earlier pattern design research (Cumming, 2015), ‘oneP-foundation’, developed a close fitting women’s shell for woven cloth without reliance on multiple cut pieces. This draping method wrapped the upper back and arms from crucial body pivot points at the back nape and scapulae spiraling the shapes around the arms, and contoured the remaining back around the torso front. Focus was given to the behaviour of the fabric, inherent strength and stretch of grain-lines and the shaping of lines to allow forward shoulder and arm movement with lift action without disrupting or compromising close garment fit and ease. Utilizing this method, with the same derived body pivot points and curved balance lines, high stretch fabric is used alongside minimal stretch fabric in this current work to develop fashion active wear designs. Comparative analysis found this new model of pattern cutting provided a common pattern methodology for non-stretch and stretch apparel. This functional design response to the technical performance of fabric on the moving body brings apparel for sport and fashion into the same realm for design technical application and enhanced wearer use.