Whilst designing for this part of my Major Project I had a minimal amount of base garments I could use due the time period of the piece. I had 3 main layers for the women and a several amountod garments for the men and several large groups of both women and men to start designing for. I found that using digital designing to do several line drawings on one page was an effective way of seeing different variations and layering of the base garments; chitons, himation’s, chlamys and peplos.
This method of designing also allowed me to see how my designs would look as an ensemble and how they would work as a large group of people. By having lots of variations all lined up next to each other on different body types I was able to see how different the same garments looked on different bodies, which is definitely something that I will implement in my future designs and is something that is very important to consider whilst designing.
I added aspects of shibari and bondage to my designs which further made each costume somewhat individual to the character yet still worked as an ensemble. This is something that I found quite expressive and a unique way of portraying the character before adding colour and pattern. I was able to see the minimal bare bones of the costume that I could then build from. This is something I had not thought about doing previously with creating a base and building off of. I found it to be both freeing with not having to stress about what was underneath the details and also a way to push my creativity to develop new ways of layering and styling the shibari and the Chitons, peplos and himation’s.
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