BRITTANY WESTBROOK
ALL THAT GLITTERS
Dark corridors. Candles flickering gold in the shadowy night. Secret moments.
During my studies, I found myself spending a few months in the wonderful city
that is Florence, Italy. Exploring the hidden gems around the city, finding
secluded coves, and losing myself in the mysteries of secret passageways that
transported you back the time of the Medici’s. The drama, the intrigue, the
absolute regality of the lives these city streets had seen. It was a time of
transformation and reinvention, of pushing boundaries and then pushing them
further, until a whole new way of life was composed.
It was this feeling, of time traveling into a cosmic history, that challenged me to
explore other options than one might first turn to for evening wear. I found a
beautiful golden knit fabric with a texture that created its own challenges. I
played around with how to use that fabric in the structure of the gown itself to be
self-sufficient to hold everything in place. The design of the collection pushed
me to explore using textiles that may be contradicting to their intended
use, to create something alluring and comfortable.
I wanted fluidity in my designs, like looking from above on the city of Florence and her winding streets. I studied various forms of fabric manipulation, reading extensively through books like Tomoko Nakamichi’s “Pattern Magic,” which features beautiful techniques and was a great source of inspiration. I explored with different kinds of twists, that could be used to create depth and shadows in parts of the gold of the fabric, and highlights and shimmering in the other parts.