Fashion Design School of Design
Nadia Sum Yuet Law
Design practice
My process is initiated through responding to my environment where I take inspiration from the physical findings of my environment as well as the social attitudes of being mixed race in Belfast. My design process is explored by collecting objects of inspiration. I observe the landscape of home in my graduate collection, using the discarded fishing nets found at Belfast Lough to inspire fabric manipulation techniques.
I highlight responsible design etiquette in my response to inclusion of minority communities. This is fuelled by my own experiences with racism which have had profound effect upon my design practice whereby I credit lived experiences of minority communities. My graduate collection honours the community of racial minorities especially through the predominantly white landscape of Belfast. This collection is the space I wish I had growing up, creating a third-space culture whereby I am simultaneously Irish and Cantonese, and it is exclusively informed by my experience and memories of home.
BA Graduate Collection
BROR
Rooted in my community and inspired by the boisterous Belfast Craic; this collection explores my mixed-race heritage, responding to my experience of both Irish and Cantonese influence. Fuelled by the charisma and boisterousness of my siblings and encouraged with Irish luck, I respond to my physical landscape of Belfast as I look to my back garden of Belfast Lough to collect shells and fishing nets. Paired with my tokens of Hong Kong like the crumpled red packets I have held on to since a child; this blended influence of home resulted in a vibrant celebration of texture, silhouette and fabric manipulation. My practice is rooted in nostalgia, personal to a time of my childhood in the early 2000s. I focus on the clothes I saw my family wear and I use the landscape of growing up in an immigrant household to contextualise my narrative. In honouring denim in this collection, I find a relatability to the fabric of what my family wore as uniform in their Chinese takeaways, and it bridges my eastern and western influences.
styling for design
This is a self-directed project exercising styling as a tool of researching the garment tropes and attributes I gravitate towards. Styling oneself is personal and expressive of the individual wearing the clothes; making this a very cathartic process of design as I dress my friends in their own wardrobes in odd, ridiculousness – where more is more. I explore the relationship between the people and their clothes through key areas : layering, mis-wearing the items, repetition of prints, texture and patterns, sports iconography, and movement. Exposing these characteristics of clothing has allowed my approach to fashion to be fully dynamic outside of a 2D design and sketch by understanding the relationship of the archetypal garments and the wearer.
BROR Magazine
BROR Magazine is a collaboration project with Fashion student Nadia Law. With her final year collection taking place, she wanted to have documented work that she could bring to London Graduate Fashion Week. I was responsible for photographing her final collection and collating her work through this publication.
The publication features a diverse selection of paper stocks, a screen-printed cover and white ink prints.
