New York, London, Milan, Paris- Overall trend reports!

After getting a little bit sick of making these boards on photoshop and spending hours on end erasing the backgrounds from behind catwalk models(not great for self esteem...or eyesight!)I decided to speed the process up a bit and instead of doing a set of boards for each fashion week I have made an overall collection of trend boards featuring designers from London, Milan, Paris and New York.

The first board is animal prints. A catwalk staple, regardless of season and location, this also means it can be quite difficult to produce a new take on the animal print. Generally leopard is the default animal print, but for SS14 designers seem to be leaning more towards zebra, giraffe and snake prints.

Temperley(shown below), however, decided to stick with the trusty leopard print. By combining the animal print with painterly orchids and merging the leopard and orchid spots, Temperley managed to produce a leopard floral hybrid, while retaining an overriding sense of class(as I'm sure we are all aware, leopard print doesn't always have associations with classy people).

The Linear trend I identified in the Paris trend reports, proved to be a strong trend across the board.I am really looking forward to using thin delicate lines such as these to add detail to my personal drawing work.

Onto the florals. Florals seem to dominate the Spring/Summer collections every yearand the SS14 collections were no different. Despite my general lack of enthusiasm for floral prints, I actually really loved the stencil and linear florals that seemed to feature in the majority of designers collections. Cutout, blocked in floral shapes featured in the collections of Marc Jacobs, Desigual, Dries Van Noten and Vivienne Westwood and strong graphic linear florals took centre stage at Jonathan Saunders, Peter Pilotto and Tracy Reese. Gone are the weak ditsy Cath Kidston-esque florals, the new floral for SS14 is strong, graphic and not to be ignored.

One of my favourite collections from London fashion week, and from all the fashion weeks combined in fact, was that of Christopher Kane. Championing the new stencil floral, Kane also provides us with a biology class through a fashion context, with colourful labelled flower cross sections featuring on his dresses and jumpers. Such a new fresh take on the traditional flora, I don't remember ever having seen floral cross sections as a catwalk print. This is definitely something I will be looking into for my own work.

Apologies for the circles around bits on this board, I've been using them at work to decide what prints to focus on....but I forgot to save the board so had to scan it back in. Ignoring that, the painterly floral trend is a great commercial way of introducing the abstract painterly trend!Although all the below designs are equally beautiful, I particularly like the Dries Van Noten dress which layers cutout florals and the background the flowers have been cut from on top of each other to create an interesting cut-out painted effect.

Below is my favourite trend of the season by far!Fashion turns to art for inspiration using purposeful brushstrokes to produce an array of colourful, childlike and expressive designs. I love the illustrative faces used in the Prada and Antonio Marras collections and the Gauguin-esque paintings used on the dresses in the collection for Aquilano Rimondi. Such an inspirational trend, it's so nice to finally see paintings gaining some recognition through fashion. It almost seems to signify a return to more traditional design as opposed to the digital designs we are becoming so used to.

Novelty is always the most interesting aspect of the catwalks, I always love to see what novelty trends are emerging,particularly when it comes to animal imagery, and for SS14 I have identified 3 main ones. 

Firstly, championed by Kenzo and Holly Fulton, was the usage of fish. As mentioned in my Paris fashion week trend post (http://textilecandy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/paris-fashion-week-trend-report.html), there was a strong seaside/marine theme to the SS14 catwalks and the usage of fish imagery is an offshoot of this. Although fish are generally thought of as slimy creatures, definitely not generally associated with fashion, I think there are so many ways fish prints can be made more feminine by careful colour choices and by adding more detail to the scales. 

A second novelty trend is insects and butterflies. Butterflies are always present in Spring/Summer fashion and are a particular high street favourite, but designers such as Matthew Williamson, Nina Ricci and Beccaria all featured them in their SS14 collections.

Birds were also popular with a variety of designers featuring ravens, parrots, hummingbirds and storks. The final image trend I think is worth a mention is the zebra. Increasing in popularity in animal prints, the zebra as a whole has now worked it's way onto the catwalk in the collections of Suno, Orla Kiely and Marani, amongst others.

So there you have it- an overall trend report on New York, London, Milan and Paris fashion weeks!Hope you have enjoyed looking at them, I'll post again soon with some updates about what's going on in my life design wise and hopefully I'll find something inspirational to write a more intellectual blog post on soon :)

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