For sure you know the feeling. You think you are having a good time doing the things you call your job, but something is gnawing deep inside of you.
You even have some successes here and there, and then: Bang! Suddenly the world stops spinning and much of what you call your work vanishes into thin air.
Time for reflection.
I am proud of what I have achieved so far. The steps I took and what I learnt from colleagues, family and friends and what I taught myself. But still, something was missing.
I needed a challenge and found it in digital designing. This is exactly what I needed.
When I was still a student at the academy, I gave up the dream of becoming a fashion designer. With the arrival and excess of fast fashion chains in the streets, I no longer thought of fashion as very interesting. I started as a sports designer. The balance of design and function as in a symbiotic relationship appealed to me. Unfortunately, I had to let that go when the necessity of quantity and greed became more important to the company than that of quality and fulfillment.
But I don’t hold a grudge. I learnt so much there and then and I am still learning now as a freelance designer. I see how other companies want to but struggle with making their brands more sustainable and introducing digital design in their process of making.
The past years made us painfully clear we were and still are hopelessly dependent on low cost production facilities far away from where the goods are being sold. It showed us the amount of waste that is being produced and the absurdity of our consumer behavior.
What if the average consumer spends the same amount of money on less products, but of a much more sustainable quality? What if companies only produce what they actually sell, a made-to-order collection? What if we never make physical designer clothing ever again and only sell it digitally? What if?
As a big fan of #thefabricant, a digital fashion house that wastes nothing but data and exploits nothing but their imagination for creating and selling their digital designs and services, I felt extremely inspired to do more with digital design in #clo3d than I had previously done. Although I thought at first that digital only would be another trend, I realized how it could work for designs that cannot easily be made physical. I continuously ran into barriers trying to make physical properties work in the digital world, that I thought by myself, could this work the other way around? Can I create something purely digital, that I would never be able to achieve physically?
The result is this design inspired by the underwater world of jellyfish and their organic and flowing shapes. I enjoy these challenges and newly inventions that make room for more and I finally feel the desire again I had as a child to become a fashion designer.