Gen Woo Ladies, Tweens, Girls and Baby Retro Psychedelia
Gen Woo Ladies, Tweens, Girls and Baby Retro Psychedelia
Our ‘Retro Psychedelia’ story is a more feminine collection that was print driven, mixing different gingham prints with a larger scale retro floral’s and checkerboards. The colour pallet mixed shades of bubble gum pinks, apricot with a stronger raspberry colour.
We wanted this story to work across ladies, tweens, girls and babywear. Our shapes ranged from cute shirring babydoll dresses and rompers to fun jumpsuits, shirring crop top's and high waisted crop leggings for our tweens and youth lines. The looks were finished off with a cropped and an oversized blazer, our first season producing more complicated shapes such as blazers.
Our starting influence for this story was the collaboration of the late American designer Ken Scott x Gucci resort SS21.
Alessandro Michele used Ken Scott’s retro floral prints across Gucci’s iconic styles in men’s and women’s ready to wear, accessories and footwear.
We love colour and print at Gen Woo, so when we saw that a lot of the SS22 runways were also full of bright colours and retro 70’s print, we decided to have some fun with the season and build on this trend.
In terms of print we particularly loved MSGM, and their interpretation of gingham style prints that were either larger in scale, hand painted, in colours not traditionally used or placed on shapes not traditionally used. We loved Anna Sui’s use of combining floral vectors in her gingham print, her vector style retro florals and 70’s stripes. We also loved the prints of Mira Mikati , Paco Rabanne, Etro and Mira Mikati's more vector graphic blooms.
In terms of styling we were really looking at a few things. We loved the 3rd series of Sex Education shown on Netflix. The vintage interiors created behind vibrant colourful outfits of the cast we thought was really cool.
We also were looking at Mary Quant for her bright colour blocking use and styling, of particular reference was her exhibition at the V & A in London last year.
We also took a nostalgic look back at the 90’s, styling, shapes, fabrics and pop stars like the Spice girls. We saw that urban outfitters and Bershka were going heavily into this trend.
With covid rules relaxed and a bigger marketing budget we planned four different types of photoshoots this season. Our product photography was either flat lay or ghost mannequin alongside our white background catalogue shoot. We then planned a studio editorial and our first go at street style shots.
We also wanted to expand our creative team and explore collaborating with new artists. We contacted new photographers, make-up artists and model agencies, with the aim of giving fresh life to the clothes.
We spent a lot of time casting models, trying to find the perfect look for our clothes, sourcing the perfect accessories, deciding how the hair and make-up should look for each model we worked with. We looked at which models would work in a pair, a group setting, which would be more suitable for our catalogue.
Bringing these ideas to life is probably my second favourite part of working on a collection. Combining everything together to create a final image that incapsulates your original vision for the collection.
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