My collection

The above pic is my collection for threeasfour 09F/w.

This is the color family of my collection. It is inspiraed by Peclers and the threeasfour pervios collections.

The followings are my color conbinations. I tried different color combination for each outfits and then matched them to form different collection. Finally, I chose the final collection from them.

MY FINAL COLLECTION

Report of threeasfour

For this project, we chose Threeasfour as our brand for analysis.

Background of Asfour

From different media and the collection, we can define threeAsfour as the avant-garde collective. It originally included Adi Gil, Angela Donhauser, Kai Kuhne and Gabi Asfour (they only use their first names) and was called Asfour. All of the designers came from different contries: Adi came from Israel, Ange form Tajikistan, Kai from German and Gabi from Lebanon. Ange and Adi met as fashion students in Munich and moved to New York after graduation. They randomly met Gabi during their styling work for paper and now-defunct store Dressing Room. Then, their mutyak friends introduced them to Kai, whose male-modeling career wan't going quite as planned. That's the beginning of Asfour.

Designs

The designers are regarded as avant-garde designers. Their designs are mainly inspired by the natural world- the anatomy of the human body, plants and animals whose graceful forms exemplify perfection in design, balance and motion.

New York

From an interview by Renata Espinosa, we can find out that why they choose to debut their collection in New York.

At the dawn of 21st century, art, music, fashion and dot com money were colliding in New York City. Everything was possible and the boundaries between art and commerce were blurring at an ever-increasing rate. The most popular activities were being creative and making money. Art fed off fashion and vice versa so no one was accused of selling out.

'It's the only place. It's the most open-minded city in the world. It has the most opportunities, because it doesn't discriminate. You can be whatever you want to be. As long as you are yourself, you're accepted here.' said Gabi in the interview.

Experimental Fashion

In the beginning, Asfour tried to be experimental. They played with fashion, then photography, styling and makeup. They used to have girls in their studio every day to style them and make a whole image of them. On the other hand, they were doing their collection as experimental as possible.

'Evolution is the most exciting thing. Once you get to a place and you stay there, then it's not interesting. You might as well die. There's no life.' by Gabi.

After potting the color family of each asfour and threeasfour collection, we found out the following points:

1. From the previous collection we can see that although sometimes AsFour collections use a lot of high value color, they would use a few high chroma/ low value (ascent) color to balance the collection and look more harmony and interesting.
However, the color combination is totally different in 06SS collection. This is because Kai (one of the designers) left Asfour in 2005 and their separation was not a happy one. This affected the remain designers(Kai, Ange, Adi) to use this kind of dull and grey tone color to reflect the sadness between their relationship.

As this is a special case so the color combination of this season could not be used to identify the way of using color of this brand. Therefore, I would not use this season to evaluate and forecast the coming season.

2. The value of color keeps decreasing from season to season. Could this be used as a prediction of the coming season?

3. Every season has some main colors and ascent colors. Main colors usually related to the theme of the collection. Ascent colors usually reflect the trend of that season.

For example:

The theme of 08Ss is 'the ideas of movement with wind and feathers'. Therefore, they chose beige, light grey and light brown colors as main colors to achieve the look of 'wave, 'crescent' and 'windmill'.

They chose sharp yellow, red and orange these kinds of high chroma colors as the ascent colors. It is because the trend of 08SS is 'flower power' and those colors indicate the colors of petals and stamen.

4. They keep using some colors like purple and grey from season to season with the changes of value and chroma.

For my own collection, I combined the information from the famous trend forecasting company ‘Peclers’ with our analysis of threeasfour design elements and color combination.

As we have to design outfits for the fall/winter, I focus on the color family of the pervious F/W collections. I found the theme ‘Delight’ from Peclers is the most suitable one. I chose shocking pink as the accent colors and deep and concentrated colors like deep brown, deep blue, blood red, deep green as the main colors.

For the design details of the outfits, I analysis the collections and found that the curve lines, light weight and shiny fabric, neckline, ruffles are the main design details. Also, I chose the theme ‘Careening’ as the main inspiration for my collection. I designed 6 outfits with the focus on the curvy silhouette, shoulder line and neckline. Also, I used ruffles as a main design details.

(FINISHED FINALLY!!!)

Color Aanlysis (from Mono's)

after discussing, we've found out the main order of colors, here're some main points:


1) there's a common order between AsFour and ThreeAsFour. though the sub-order maybe different, they all put some high chroma/high value or low chroma/ high chroma colors in their collections, and adding an accent color in each collection. that's why it seems less boring as a whole.

2)the main colors are usually close related to its themes while the accent colors are choose according to the trend flow. though an accent color is used, it aims at embellishment, so other colors still take the main role in the collection in order to make the shole collection consistent.

3) 06 s/s from Asfour seems inconsistent with the other collections. WHY? at that time, the group was having a bad time, one of the member Kai left because of the discoordination with the other members in ideas. we infer that it influences a lot in the 06 S/S collection. plus, they've opening a new demin line at the period, i believe that they were focuing on the "design" more than "colors".

4) in the recent collections of ThreeAsFOUR, we discover that there's a tendency of lightening its main colors from the previous collection and take that as main in the latter one(e.g from 06 fw to 07 fw// from 08 ss to 09 ss)

5) but we still try to figure out the reason the sudden change from 07 fw to 08 ss.

Color Chart (From mono's)

as you can see, here are the color proportions for all the collections. the order of using colors can be seen more clearly.here're few main points : (we will focus on ThreeAsFour mainly)


1) the use of colors by AsFour is not as good as ThreeAsFour. compartively, AsFour is less mature and inconsistent when ThreeAsFour has well developed their own pattern of using and organizing colors.


2) as i've mentioned in the previous post of analyzing, there's a tendency of lighten the colors from 06 F/W to 09 S/S. that's why we believe that the colors of next season will also take 2 or 3 colors from previous collection and lighten them.


3) pale peach,nude, and pale violent are usually used in the collections.

as you can see, we've added a line in the middle of the color bars.it's for dividing the main colors and accent colors.


for the upper part(main colors):


1) low chroma to medium chroma + high/low value (it depends on whether the collection is F/W or S/S)

2) normally chosen according to the theme

3) 2-3 colors


for the lower part(accent colors):


1) high chroma (normally chosen from the trend)

2) adjusted chroma and value of the main colors

3) 4-8 colors (it depends)

4) high chroma colors

Class Ex. 5 Driving force (mind map)

threeasfour FW Collections color families

06FW Collection

07FW Collection

08FW Collection

Trend Forecast

For the outfits, I chose the theme "Careening" as curvy silhouette is the main design elements, whuch match with the main design signature of threeasfour. From the pictures above you can find that the designs mainly focus on the shoulder line and the cut. Therefore, in my collection I would combine these elements with that I found from threeasfour's collections.

For the color forecasting, I chose the theme "Delight". This is because I found that the color combination matches with that of threeasfour's pervious fall/winter collections. Both of them consists of deep and concentrated color as the main colors and 1-4 acent colors for highlight. The picture above shows the acent colors of the coming 09 F/W would probably be shocking pink.