When I was starting to design clothes, for the lack of budget and all, I would ask my friends for their old clothes and turn them into Comme des Garcons wannabes. My fascination for transforming old clothes got intensified when my father would bring Pacific Friends, a Japanese magazine about Japanese culture. Part of their features were designers, of course, and early on I was exposed to the designs of Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and especially, Junya Watanabe. I remember Junya's spring/summer 1997 collection featured reworked vintage clothing. That time he was one of the 'it' designer du jour. Since then I've done collections of my own mixing reworked vintage clothes with new fabrics. I was rummaging my ukay pile last night and saw this pale green trenchcoat. I got inspired to turn it into an edgy windbreaker.
The concept was to deconstruct the whole piece with minimal cutting and basically using almost all of the item. It's also an exercise in pattern manipulation. I started off by cutting the sleeves carefully, evenly and as cleanly as possible. You don't want rugged edges 'coz it's a pain to attach again.
Next is to remove the collar to release what would become the bottom area. Basically I will invert the whole piece.
When inverted and pinned to the dress form it will look like this.
The front portion. Next step is to visualize the shape and details you want for the jacket.
The pin will be your bestfriend. Lots of it! Lots of patience for trial and error is needed.
Here you can see I've pinned what would be the shoulder line.
Here you can see I'm cutting what would become the collar. Originaly it's the hip area.
Voila! All I need to do is tweak it some more and attach the sleeves, zipper and other details.
Next post I will show, like what Mother Ricky Reyes would say, the phinish (finished) product.
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