"Other people come to this country looking for work with no money, no food, and no common language. There's no excuse why you can't do this. It just takes guts," my professor said as she introduced the very daunting syllabus for my evening wear class. This one phrase stuck with me all week and I started to internalize that there was absolutely no excuse for why I could not achieve the things I've set out to achieve this year. The only thing there was to do was work really hard.
That being said, the first week was all about editing our collections. We used a few strong points in our research to dive deeper. My professor guides us in a very new way, telling us to work with boards and loose images rather than in a sketchbook. I've found that this method allows for easy editing. Once the story is clear, concise, and solidified we can move on to build a great concept book. While I'm not used to working like this at SCAD, this is how we worked at my internship. Nothing was ever "glued down" until the day it was due. Things need to be accessible, removable, and impersonal. The more flexible we are with our ideas, the better. I enjoy feeling as though I'm going to work each day while still making all the design decisions. How often does a person get to do this?! It's amazing.
The fashion department had its first ever group critique on Friday. Our chair designed it to be a collaborate discussion with people and professors outside of our class. Each of us got feedback about our concept so we could refine it over the weekend. He warned us to take all feedback with a grain of salt- everybody has a different opinion to offer. While this critique was helpful on many levels, it also left a lot of people every confused about the direction they want to go in. But in the end, the most important part of this thesis project is doing you and listening to your inner designer voice. Nobody is going to tell us what to do every step of the way in our career, so we should be training ourselves to trust our eyes and not be afraid of failure early on.
I found that my critique boiled down to clarity. All weekend I tried to step outside of my eyes and see it from the perspective of a person who doesn't know anything about what I'm working on. Would they understand it? If the answer was no I would move things around until I felt like it would be perceived correctly by an outsider. Once the images tell a complete story, the foundation is set. Now we just have to stick to it! There's no reason why we can't make it happen.