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| Apparel design major Kyoko Wakamatsu displays her award-winning floor-length silk gown. |
2:50 p.m., April 10, 2003--Kyoko Wakamatsu, CHEP 2003, an apparel design major who learned to sew less than two years ago, recently was a finalist in a major international competition for young designers. The gown she designed is now on public view in the second-floor display window of Alison Hall West.
The floor-length silk gown, which features a striking pair of bright-green lovebirds hand-painted at the hem, was one of 10 U.S. winners selected to compete in the International Contest for Young Designers, held in Paris in December. The annual contest, which began in 1982 and is sponsored by Air France, attracted designers from about 50 fashion schools in 12 countries.
“Kyoko is an extraordinary student who is always challenging herself to do more and more, and her ability to pay attention to details is exceptional,” said Jo Kallal, professor of consumer studies, who first told Wakamatsu about the competition. “The dress is quite a sophisticated design, especially for a designer without a lot of experience, and it required a lot of time-consuming handwork.”
The dress consists of an inner layer of peach-colored silk charmeuse and an outer layer of off-white silk satin organza with a bateau neckline. Wakamatsu painted cherry tree branches on the right shoulder and more branches, on which the lovebirds perch, on the right side near the hem. She used the same off-white organza fabric of the outer layer to make lengths of cording, which she knotted to form a kind of loose covering and draped over the bodice.
“The competition had a theme, ‘Fashion and Love,’ so I came up with the idea of ‘Love Knots,’ for my design,” Wakamatsu said. “The knotted cord makes the dress three-dimensional because, to me, love is not two-dimensional—it’s three-dimensional.”
Wakamatsu, who transferred to UD in spring 2001 from a school with no fashion program, took her first sewing class that summer. Since then, Kallal said, “She’s been driven to learn more.”
Participating in the contest was certainly a learning experience, Wakamatsu said.
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| Wakamatsu’s dress features a pair of bright-green lovebirds hand-painted at the hem. |
When she first sketched the dress to enter the U.S. competition, she said, “I was designing it without even knowing how I was going to make it. The birds are painted on, and I had never done a fabric painting before. It’s cut on the bias, and I had never worked on the bias before. Everything was new to me.”
In addition, garments are made in one of two ways, either using a flat pattern or by draping. Although Wakamatsu had worked with patterns before, she had not yet learned draping techniques. “I realized later,” she said, “that the design I came up with needed to be draped.”
With the help of Kallal and other faculty members, teaching assistants and fellow students, Wakamatsu learned what she needed to turn her sketches into an actual dress. She was among 45 entrants accepted into the U.S. competition in May and worked throughout the summer to create the dress, which had to be shipped to Cincinnati in late August.
“At the end, I was almost living in Alison Hall,” she said, estimating that she worked at least 200 hours on the project. “I was sewing up until the last minute, when a friend drove me to Federal Express at the Philadelphia Airport” to meet the latest overnight shipping deadline they could find in the area.
After competing in Cincinnati and being selected as a U.S. finalist, Wakamatsu went to Paris in December. The competition was held in the Louvre, where the dresses were shown to the judges by professional models using high-fashion runways. Although Wakamatsu didn’t win a prize in Paris, “The competition was just an amazing experience,” she said.
Wakamatsu completed high school in her native Japan and came to the United States to attend West Texas A&M University. She transferred from there to UD, with an interest in fashion but no firm career plans.
“I thought I might go into fashion merchandising, not design, because I didn’t think of myself as a creative person,” she said. “But, I liked my first sewing class right away, and every time I do more sewing and design, I just love it. Every project teaches me something more.”
After graduating in May, she hopes to work in the fashion industry in the United States for a year and then attend a graduate school that specializes in apparel design.
Article by Ann Manser
Photos by Kathy Flickinger
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