Utilising textiles and photography, Josie Lomas’ piece plays with costume, identity, gender and environment; all expressed and explored through the movement of her subjects.
MORE
Josie says:
“I start all my garments the same way, with a design sketch. This is probably the most important stage in each garment’s process, especially as I self draft all of my patterns from scratch. Having this design sketch helps me plan out my designs and helps me think about how to build and create each garment. This stage can be relatively quick for more simple designs or take a long time when working with complex shapes and silhouettes.”
“For my hoop skirt and corset designs, I worked on my design sketch for a long time to work out the circumference of each hoop in my skirt, the distance between each hoop and how to construct each of the corset tops. The actual creation of these garments was also a long process and I had to refer back to my design sketch repeatedly. It was mostly a process of trial and error in this case as I had never made anything similar to these hoop skirts before.”
“When creating my flare suit I also came across a lot of problems. Having never created a suit before, I started by creating a practice pattern to see how pattern pieces interacted and to iron out any problems with my design. After practising with this design, I moved on to creating my actual garments. I finished the jacket with hooks and eyes to fasten the front to create a corset style fit across the midriff.”
“For my crochet dress, I had to create 60 granny squares. I used colours inspired by the 70s to give the final garment a retro and timeless feel. I had to learn how to crochet for this project. I used 3 different colour combinations of wool for the crotchet squares to create some interest and variation.”
Josie Lomas / @josie_lomas