For our Unit 5: Integrated Art & Design Research, Ideas and Methods we had to pick one designer out of a list of 7. My first pick was Comme des Garçon and second Jil Sanders. Completely different approaches, but two brands that I admire for different reasons. Comme des Garçon is innovative and extremely "out there" as opposite to Jil Sanders which style is quite minimalistic and simple. But in the end, I ended up doing the promotion part of Comme des Garçon alongside another classmate. I like Comme, it's an interesting brand to work with, because you have freedom to play around with everything. It's very conceptual and the crazier the better, which worried me a bit at the beginning. About how far is too far? I believe that there is a point you can lose perspective if you go too overboard. And that was something I was worried about. My group was really good, creative, willing to try crazy concepts and we worked good together. At the beginning I really felt the group was going all over the place and nowhere at the same time. Too much creativity and no so much of focus. The ideas were brilliant, but once they were spoken they were easily forgotten and replaced by the next. Which in a way is a good thing, it means we were working and putting our minds into it, but, on the other hand made it difficult to follow one path and stick with it.
We ended up following a path that at first seemed very obvious and traditional, but we took a different turn. After reading the poem we were given, we came up with the concept of profanity, which is obvious if you relate to religion, freedom, gypsies, etc. So instead, we came up with the concept that "profane" is everything that is not traditional and it's outside the "normal form". So from that point we started looking into the sense of community and freedom, because if you're outside the "norm" you are "free" to be something else. Which is a bit what Comme des Garçon is all about. We divided the tasks and I felt a little bit that the group was lacking research on the brand by only focusing on the theme. So I did my own research and passed on to the group. We saw that some aspects of the brand linked with our theme, like making creating something outside the box and the do-it-yourself.
I'm responsible for doing the photoshoot and to be honest, everybody had something to say about it. That made me feel annoyed because I was trying to create something and developed, but the group - and other classmates - were constantly disturbing the peace. I felt they were diminishing the photoshoot and focusing only on the movie. The concept of the shoot was a simple lookbook but instead a white wall, a brick wall and the model wouldn't have a head. We would take the head off and put elements related to the theme, like a bird head, feathers and coloured smoke. I learned with this project how to fight my corner and defend my opinions, our group can sometimes try to eat each other's opinion.
We had to discuss and brainstorm about the two quotes and create a mood board about it, then create the mood board for the brand and for our future ideas. We managed to do it as a group, nobody worked alone. I believe our group is quite strong and balanced, we have the ultra creative members with the more "traditional" members. And we shared all the responsibilities so nobody was left empty-handed.
For me, personally, at first I had my doubts about the group. I think everybody is really good and we were testing each other and seeing what the other were doing it, we work good together even though sometimes we can quite not understand what the others are doing and I don't think we were 100% comfortable with each other and listening to what the other had to say. But let's see how this goes.
