In the busyiness of planning and designing our exhibition we hadn't given this part of the project much thought so we decided to spend some time over half term coming up with ideas about what it might be and how it might work.
As we've been doing lots of planning I thought it would be a good chance to get creative, so the first task was to use the collection as inspiration for creating some contemporary outfits.
looking at images of the clothing on display the group came up with words to discribe their style and fit.
The group came up with words such as embelished, embroderied, details, bulky construction, pleats, colourful and symbols.
We then split into two teams, with each team pulling two words from a bag. One was a word about style or fit the other a motif from the clothing. The first team got the words "bats" and "layers" and the second team had "pleats" and "birds". Their challenge was to create a paper outfit using these words as a basis.
Here are the end results
"Bats" and "layers" became a dress with batwing sleeves..
"Birds" and "pleats" turned into this dress, with a feather inspired collar.
The next thing was to think about what we would like to do for our cultural catwalk event.
The group decided they would like to work with an artist or designer to create contemporary clothing inspired by the collection. They wanted to have a couple of sessions with the designer where they were "trained" up and then were able to assist the designer delivering sessions to different community groups. The groups would create outfits to show at the Cultural catwalk.
We would offer paper outfit workshops as part of the end event for people to take part in, but the group felt that paper outfits might not last for very long so wouldn't work for the main catwalk designs.
The group liked pulling out the words as a basis for their design and thought the process they had gone through today would work well as a workshop to offer to others.
So a few more decisions made, the next task is to make it happen...