From the Hand & Lock website:
This years HAND & LOCK prize for Embroidery brief is inspired by celebration. With an exciting year ahead in the UK, the 2012 Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, we can’t get enough. Get in the spirit with us by creating embroideries and designs worthy of ‘occasion’. Join us by celebrating ours or show us one of your own.
The below are specific trends forecast by Zoom on fashion trends 47 s/s 2012, a/w 2012/3. Use one of these specific briefs to inspire your project.
1. FADED SUMMERS
Remembered summers and memories of past celebration. Using faded colours and surfaces bleached by the sun, take yourself back to childhood memories on old postcards or old photos of the sea side and family parties. Beach houses, huts and sheds. Vintage street parties, bunting and national flags. Pride. Vintage and loose looks. Light canvas, worn knits, embossed and relief surfaces. Shaded stripes and prints. Relief surfaces and faded brights all should come into play, with textures of worn mesh, old ropes, tattered flags draping and wrinkling, chipped surfaces, rust, large knits and perforations.
Faded colours: Pastels, dull pinks, oranges and reds. Greys, coral, lobster, musk. Yellow khaki and beige. Sepia.
2. ASSOCIATION D’ERMITES
The desert hermit and the astronaut observe the course of the stars, traces of moonlight at dawn, mica stones on sand and the soaring flight of silvery egrets. On the horizon, touched by the rising sun a virtual mirage appears. It looks like a technological dream in which archaeologists and monks of future times decipher hieroglyphics carved on rough, faded finds and study the sacred gold-covered writings that fill the almost transparent skins of ancient parchments. It’s a mysterious, enigmatic tale that teams the hyper-modern with the remote and the authentic. Textures are desiccated, almost rustic or more precious, shiny and delicately set with gems or finely carved. Paper and embossed surfaces, enriched with metallic highlights, are striking. The washed out and over-dyed nubuck creates all-new combinations alongside jute, hemp and enriched, weighted linen or dried python skin. The colours are conflicting but closely linked stony and unreal, rough and sparkling.
Colours: Midnight blues and metallics. Bright whites contrasted with the deepest sunset reds and black.
3. OPEN MIND
Perfection gives way to a taste for imbalance that leads to strong contrasts and flawed harmonies producing a more all eclectic and open-minded fashion. Fabrics have a strong character thanks to a collision between primitive and civilised, sporty and chic. Plastic brightness side by side with neutrals high luxury standing toe to toe with witty fanciful motifs. Hi Tech fabric and chiffon. It’s a style that refuses all dictates, which courageously takes risks, bargains with originality and proudly extols its uniqueness. Multi-coloured shades on wool and cotton enriched with fancy yarns, madras and plaids with a restrained liveliness, colourful embroidery and guipures. An ironic confusion produced by differences between patterns and backgrounds, by effects that reproduce marbling waves and jacquards in which mischievous animals hide. Modern motifs in age old techniques or the opposite. The seamless combination of the old and the new. Transparent or vinyl coatings delicately decorated with sequins or ultra-lacquered like nail polish. Slippery and shiny knit and silk. Linen, cotton and silk have a natural, almost wild, appearance thanks to imaginative interweaving, rudimental waves, ‘crude’ embroidery and lace. The irony continues thanks to the swapping of characteristics such as elasticity and water tightness between city’s elements and active sports that result in technical but chic products.
If you would like to participate in this year’s prize, please click here to view the entrance details.
