Nothing captures a fashion moment or mood quite like a designer's first drawing for a dress. And yet these glorious doodles have always been consigned to a corner of an atelier, unseen by anyone else - until now. Eithne Farry delights in a new book that has dusted them off
As you look at a catwalk snap of a model swathed in romantic ruffles, or edgily suave in a slim-flitting, vaguely S&M leather dress, you may ponder how the designer came up with that particular idea. A stroll around a studio might reveal inspiration boards, stills from films, postcards from art galleries and swatches of draped fabrics in rainbow shades and strokable textures. But often the jump-off point is a sketch by the designer, a little picture that magically captures the mood for a forthcoming collection. As the book Fashion Illustration by Fashion Designers reveals, these drawings can range from sophisticated computer-enhanced images, to collages made from sticky paper and charcoal, to a simple line drawing scribbled on to a bit of white paper with a trusty pencil.
Laird Borrelli, a fashion historian, collected the work of 60 international designers, persuading them to unpin their art from those inspiration boards, or tug them out of the messy piles of paper secreted in corners of their sunny ateliers. The legendary couturiers Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Lacroix handed over drawings, as did fashionable newcomers such as Christopher Kane and Rodarte. All - despite widely differing styles - share a deep-held affection for the art of illustration, and the strange alchemy of a process that transforms a flat picture into a 3D, flowingly embellished, show-stopping dress.
Borelli thinks that there's an aspect of 'peep-show-like titillation' to these illustrations - not for their erotic frisson, but because they were never intended for public viewing. Unlike the meticulous technical drawings that provide the nitty-gritty detail of how each garment in a collection should be assembled (the clothing equivalent of an architect's blueprints), the work gathered here is personal to the artist. It's a far cry from stylised photo-shoots, slick advertorials and extravagantly staged fashion shows. These illustrations are, according to Molly Grad, a recent graduate of Central Saint Martins, 'as direct as handwriting; a way of seeing into a designer's thought processes'.
For some, this part of the designer's work is almost a compulsion. Christian Lacroix describes his sketches as 'reminders' and, although the finished frock may bear only a passing resemblance to the bright-pink, ink-washed dress with black shoulder ruffles that he committed to paper for his autumn/winter 2000 collection, drawing it is an intrinsic part of the process. 'Drawing is such a habit, a need, a reflex, that even without any paper I can draw with my finger in the air, or with a piece of wood, a straw or a stone on sand or mud… it's my way of taking notes.'
Christopher Kane, the Scottish designer whose neon-bright, super-short bandage dresses caused such a sensation in 2006, recalls 'doodling and sketching women with and without clothes at around four or five years old. I used to fantasise about ball gowns with bows and long-haired girls.' His black-and-white pencil sketches of demure wooden-spoon girls wearing sexy little dresses are 'initial drawings' that get him 'excited and ready to start creating clothes'.
Nothing captures a fashion moment or mood quite like a designer's first drawing for a dress. And yet these glorious doodles have always been consigned to a corner of an atelier, unseen by anyone else - until now. Eithne Farry delights in a new book that has dusted them off
As you look at a catwalk snap of a model swathed in romantic ruffles, or edgily suave in a slim-flitting, vaguely S&M leather dress, you may ponder how the designer came up with that particular idea. A stroll around a studio might reveal inspiration boards, stills from films, postcards from art galleries and swatches of draped fabrics in rainbow shades and strokable textures. But often the jump-off point is a sketch by the designer, a little picture that magically captures the mood for a forthcoming collection. As the book Fashion Illustration by Fashion Designers reveals, these drawings can range from sophisticated computer-enhanced images, to collages made from sticky paper and charcoal, to a simple line drawing scribbled on to a bit of white paper with a trusty pencil.
'The Garden of Earthly Delights’, by Basso & Brooke, 2005
Laird Borrelli, a fashion historian, collected the work of 60 international designers, persuading them to unpin their art from those inspiration boards, or tug them out of the messy piles of paper secreted in corners of their sunny ateliers. The legendary couturiers Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Lacroix handed over drawings, as did fashionable newcomers such as Christopher Kane and Rodarte. All - despite widely differing styles - share a deep-held affection for the art of illustration, and the strange alchemy of a process that transforms a flat picture into a 3D, flowingly embellished, show-stopping dress.
Borelli thinks that there's an aspect of 'peep-show-like titillation' to these illustrations - not for their erotic frisson, but because they were never intended for public viewing. Unlike the meticulous technical drawings that provide the nitty-gritty detail of how each garment in a collection should be assembled (the clothing equivalent of an architect's blueprints), the work gathered here is personal to the artist. It's a far cry from stylised photo-shoots, slick advertorials and extravagantly staged fashion shows. These illustrations are, according to Molly Grad, a recent graduate of Central Saint Martins, 'as direct as handwriting; a way of seeing into a designer's thought processes'.
For some, this part of the designer's work is almost a compulsion. Christian Lacroix describes his sketches as 'reminders' and, although the finished frock may bear only a passing resemblance to the bright-pink, ink-washed dress with black shoulder ruffles that he committed to paper for his autumn/winter 2000 collection, drawing it is an intrinsic part of the process. 'Drawing is such a habit, a need, a reflex, that even without any paper I can draw with my finger in the air, or with a piece of wood, a straw or a stone on sand or mud… it's my way of taking notes.'
Christopher Kane, the Scottish designer whose neon-bright, super-short bandage dresses caused such a sensation in 2006, recalls 'doodling and sketching women with and without clothes at around four or five years old. I used to fantasise about ball gowns with bows and long-haired girls.' His black-and-white pencil sketches of demure wooden-spoon girls wearing sexy little dresses are 'initial drawings' that get him 'excited and ready to start creating clothes'.
There's nothing demure about the American designer Betsey Johnson's ladies, who leap off the page in wild felt-tipped colours, spotted stockings and rose-patterned corsets. But her earlier drawings, such as the one above from 1967, show an altogether simpler, cleaner silhouette. Her 1990s designs are brash and exuberant - full of cartoon fun and detail, a complete contrast to the barely-there ink and watercolours of Gene Kang and Hanii Yoon, the couple behind the label Y & Kei Water the Earth. A dabble of white and a puddle of black suggest an elegant ensemble, but you'd be hard-pressed to imagine exactly what the white coat and bow-shaped black skirt would look like when turned into actual clothes.
This is not the case with Yves Saint Laurent's picture for the iconic 1966 Le Smoking, or Karl Lagerfeld's vibrant homage to Coco Chanel's designs. Saint Laurent's simple sketch of the tuxedo suit for women manages to convey the long, lean, androgynous appeal of the real thing. He explained in the 2002 documentary Yves Saint Laurent: His Life and Times: 'When I pick up a pencil, I don't know what I'll draw. Nothing is planned. It's the miracle of a moment…I start with a woman's face, and suddenly a dress follows, or the garment takes shape… It's a very pure form of creation, without any preparation, without any vision. When the design's done, I'm very happy. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Then you must stop drawing, go and do something else. But you will always come back to paper and pencil.'
Saint Laurent's images have a timeless cocktail-party glamour and are as unlike the alien dolly girls with their flower-petal frocks who stare out of Giambattista Valli's 2007 sketches as it is possible to be.
The same edginess can be seen in Molly Grad's work: her spindle-thin girls with scraped-back hair and hostile expressions look like trouble. Painting in watercolour and coal, with pencilled-in detail, Grad eschews prettiness for a darker aesthetic. 'My thoughts are linked directly with a pencil. Drawing plays a key part in my work. It is the starting position where all my ideas come from, and the finishing point, when it is used as a detailed technical sketch… as a base to make a collection.'
Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the two sisters who make up Rodarte, spent their childhoods scribbling. 'Kate would draw elaborate costumes and I would sign my name on them,' says Laura. The self-taught designers' pictures have a whimsical appeal. Shy girls pose coyly in voluminous bell-shaped frocks the colour of peapods, or peek over the top of a dress that looks as if it was borrowed from a bumble-bee. The sisters sit together and sketch, but as with all of the designers there is a steely practicality at the core of all this sweetness. There are clothes to be made, and then sold. 'All our ideas come out through drawing and sketching. We do not do typical line drawings, [but] the renderings of a feeling - a lightness - that we want to capture in our final product.'
Giles Deacon is aware of this pressure to produce collections that sell, but relishes the time that he spends illustrating. 'It's a form of relaxation and a route for escape. I try to draw for at least half an hour every day.' Working in watercolour, Deacon paints an elegant bloom of a skirt in dark-plum ink, with a silhouetted fitted jacket, or a long bowed dress, mottled with strangely gorgeous verdigris. 'The beauty I find with drawing,' he says, 'is that it places you in a time where you don't have to think, "Oh, I've got to design now," but you can start doing some drawings and then, after 20 minutes of getting lost in that world, it can start turning into something that you've never even imagined.'
And that's the overwhelming appeal of looking at these beautiful images, some ugly, some quirky - you can imagine the clothes that they could turn into, and covet them accordingly. But as a viewer it doesn't matter a jot if the pictures never end up as couture gowns, summer frocks or dancing skirts. The pencilled lines, the washes of watercolour and ink, are fascinating in their own right.
Invaluable as insights into the designers' creative thinking, the illustrations describe a mood, a moment, a daydream (or a nightmare), a joke, an attitude, as successfully as the finished clothes would on a model.
Source: Telegraph Media Group Limited
