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!!!)