“The Sea” is a local clothing brand from Vladivostok, which invited me to collaborate in the making of a small summer collection. It was really fun and challenging for all of us, I created a bunch of sea inspired prints on blue cotton and deeply merged into all the steps of the local cloth making process. And I want to share my experience with you.
We created a dress, a t-shirt, striped pants, shorts and a blouse, a sweatshirt, leggings and a few bags, all covered with my original prints.
We adapted my original hand-bleached prints and used discharge screen printing for multiple prints:
This is an original hand-bleached print:
While working on prints for that collaboration, I was obsessively inspired by broken pieces of ceramics shaped by the sea. There is a beach called ‘Glassy’, which is not far from Vladivostok, where instead of pebbles or sand there are millions and billions of neatly shaped pieces of glass, ceramics and clay bricks washed up on the shore by the sea of Japan.
Also, my favourite technique of cyanotype printing was the juiciest source of inspiration for the prints. I googled and found many beautiful cyanotypes of seaweed. This is how my moodboard looked like:
Here you can see the original (hand-bleached) print and our thoughts on how we will finally compose it on the dress:
It is almost magic to take part in the process of collective discussion and find the best way to share my creativity with future customers:
And finally, to see a dress:
We thought how to adapt a print from a sweatshirt to sweatpants:
Then, I created an original hand-bleached print based on a previously discussed design:
And finally, we’ve got an adapted multiplied version of my prints for deep sea loving customers:
For the store installation I created a giant hand-bleached Sperm Whale print on denim:
And even gave a few interviews, appreciating the interest to our sincere creative collaboration from local TV channels:
